‘Gravedigger’s Daughter’ intoxicating tale
“The Gravedigger’s Daughter”
by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco, 582 pages, $26.95)
If you have not read a Joyce Carol Oates novel in a while, or are new to her work, rush out and find a copy of “The Gravedigger’s Daughter.” Its mournful beauty and absorbing story may well become something you cherish until you reach your own demise.
“In animal life the weak are quickly disposed of” is the warning, a kind of haunting, that opens the book. It belongs to the dead father of 23-year-old Rebecca; she is hearing it in 1959 in her head.
These words are a bitter, unwelcome intrusion, but they serve the young woman in the most Darwinian way, because a man in a Panama hat is following her along an isolated towpath of the Erie Barge canal, outside Chautauqua Falls, N.Y.
Five hundred pages and 11 years later, Rebecca learns the true purpose of the man who trailed her, who mistook her for someone he called “Hazel Jones.” It is a deep shock to both reader and Rebecca, and yet somehow, with Oates’ accomplished writing, we intuited the truth all along.
A National Book Award winner for “Them,” Oates writes a kind of heightened realism. We trust her and her propulsive story, even as she takes risks. Nothing is simple or convenient or cheap.
At the factory where Rebecca works, “noise isn’t just sound but something physical, visceral, like electric current pumping through your body. It frightens you, it winds you tighter and tighter. Your heart is racing to keep pace. Your brain is racing but going nowhere. You can’t keep a coherent thought.”
Rebecca’s story flashes back to her Nazi-fleeing parents as they arrive in 1936 in New York Harbor, where she was born in fetid circumstances as the boat docked. How her father descends from a Hegel-loving math teacher to a cemetery caretaker to a near cloven-footed nightmare is related in a way that feels organic, almost inevitable. Oates makes the darkness understandable, and in the novel’s first section, Rebecca must claw her way out of it.
That section ends with a 40-minute beating – a horror that, in retrospect, the reader and Rebecca realize was coming. It propels her to grab her 3-year-old son, change his name and hers, and, like her parents, take flight.
But while their attempt to remake themselves ends in catastrophe, Rebecca decides to become “Hazel Jones,” a woman who adopts a “liquidy movie voice” from her job as an usherette, and, in time, takes advantage of the way those she encounters underestimate her.
Aliases bedevil the book; the fluidity of identity is a core Oates theme. She is comfortable with contradictions and a master at bringing her story full circle, so that the generations echo one another and the repetitions – in language, in behavior – break our heart.
Oates, 68, who often writes two books per year, reportedly spent 12 years on this one. The craft shows in the story’s controlled telling, the way it casts a disorienting, intoxicating spell.
Its haunting voice carries the ring of art.