Reading Man Crazy made
me want to take a long, hot shower to wash away the
sheer unpleasantness of Joyce Carol Oates' fictional
world. And Ingrid Boone, Oates' narrator, suffers far
more than I did -- she literally itches with the
creepiness that surrounds her, scratching at her own
skin until it oozes and bleeds.
Ingrid's childhood is spent in upstate New York,
piecing together the disturbing facts of her family life
and waiting with her mother, Chloe, for her father, a
hot-tempered Vietnam vet who's fleeing the police, to
reappear. Chloe is a beautiful blond who accepts
violence as inevitable. She tells her daughter that men
shoot pigeons because "it's what men do when they
can't shoot one another." The earliest chapters, which
can successfully stand on their own and have been
published as short stories, are the finest parts of the
book and offer plenty of examples of Oates' literary
skill and gift for offhand, surprisingly insightful
comments.
The novel suddenly loses all sense of perspective when
Ingrid hits adolescence and enters the mysterious milieu
of drugs and submissive sex, instead of just observing
her parents' chaotic world from the sidelines. Because
Oates never comments on Ingrid's confused story, it's
hard to fathom why she becomes Dog-girl, a member
of the Satan's Children biker group, and why she's in
thrall to the cult's leader, a poor man's Manson called
Enoch Skaggs. All we know is that Ingrid is swept up
in a world of human sacrifice and absolute madness
that's described in graphic yet weirdly dull detail:
"Dozens of bullets tore through him so his blood and
meat-tissue and certain of his organs and his intestines
would seep out onto the grassless ground where he fell
beside the rust-desiccated hulk of an abandoned tractor
seeping like cooked fruit leaking through cheesecloth
..." You get the idea.
Oates faithfully conveys what it feels like to be Ingrid,
expressing the experiences of Dog-girl in her own
words, with no mediation whatsoever. The problem is
that Ingrid's thoughts range from the addled to the
banal, and the events that she describes are as
disjointed as images flashing on MTV. Oates' refusal to
sort out Ingrid's messy ordeal leaves us with nothing
beyond the girl's own half-baked notion that she's
seeking her absent father and feels she deserves any
punishment men mete out. Man Crazy is, to borrow
from William James, all heat and no light. Oates has
taken us to hell and back without providing the insight
or sustenance to make it a trip worth taking. -- Salon
A major acheivement that stands...as a testament to the restorative power of love and the capacity to endure and prevail.
A grand symphonic novel...one of Oates' finest efforts.
What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something happening on the other side that we'd swear was life itself.
New testimony to Oates' great intelligence and dead-on imaginative powers. It is a book that will break your heart, heal it, then break it again every time you think about it.
Narrator Ingrid Boone tells the story of her desperate, unbalanced young life in one long, breathless monologue, behind which the alert reader may hear echoes of such popular classics of mental illness as The Bell Jar and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden . Despite a few stock characters and gaudy plot flourishes, however, this harrowing tale by the prolific Oates (following the well-received We Were the Mulvaneys ) crackles with dramatic intensity punctuated by beautiful turns of phrase. Ingrid is the daughter of sometimes loving but erratically violent parents. Her sluttish mother, Chloe, hangs on to her sanity by a thread, while her dashing but brutal pilot father, whom she rarely sees, is a fugitive from the law. The instability and neglect of her childhood leave Ingrid emotionally dissociated; only the contempt and torture she seeks and endures from the many men in her life make her feel alive. Late in the novel, it strikes her with the force of mystical revelation that she could learn to feel real when she is not in pain. Ingrid's story careens wildly through the back roads of rural New York, where she and her mother go into hiding, and where she first hears ghost voices. Later, there is her teenaged promiscuity, drinking and drug use as she searches for masculine love, even as she writes poetry and tries to find a norm for her existence. By the time of her catastrophic involvement with the leader of a Satanist biker cult, a walking tabloid headline who calls her "Dog-girl," she is teetering on the edge of sanity. The bizarre twists and turns of Ingrid's life take on a hallucinatory intensity, but the one constant of the gripping storythe emotional deprivation that has scarred Ingrid for lifecomes through with a fierce, burning clarity.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Ingrid Boone and her too-young momma, Chloe, live a hard-bitten life on New York's Chautauqua River as they flee Luke, a Vietnam vet who fathered Ingrid. The mostly no-account men who people Chloe's boozy existence pale beside crazed Luke, who keeps tracking down his family. Little wonder that Ingrid grows into a self-destructive adolescent, sinking into a morass of drugs and self-mutilation, believing that the path to love is lots of pain. Under the thrall of the cult leader of a motorcycle gang, Ingrid suffers a downward spiral that is nearly complete when she is gang-raped, forced to witness a decapitation, then imprisoned in a filthy basement with nothing to eat but garbage and animal waste. At the end, Oates...asks readers to believe that two years of hospitalization and intensive therapy bring Ingrid miraculous redemption and true love in the arms of her much older former psychiatrist. An ugly tale told, without question, by a master of evocative misery, but to what purpose? For Oates fans only.
Oates' 27th novel, following fast on the heels of last year's highly praised We Were the Mulvaneys , revisits the depressed upstate New York environs of her earliest (and perhaps most typical) fiction.
It's the first-person story of 21-year-old Ingrid Boone, a small-town girl who has survived her estranged parents' rootlessness and chaotic behavior, a drug- and sex-addicted adolescence, and her captivity as the slavelike "Dog-girl" of a violent, messianic biker who rules a cult called "Satan's Children." The narrative proceeds through a succession of dreamlike short scenes that replay Ingrid's sometimes discontinuous (though mainly chronological) memories and fantasies. Ingrid is a generously imagined and vividly realized character: The deprivations and self-hatred that set her on her self-destructive path are rendered with savage clarity, and Oates makes us believe that she's also a bright, sensitive girl who seeks imaginative refuge from her traumatizing circumstances by writing poetry. The characterizations of her mother Chloe, a weak-willed beauty who'll do anything to survive, and her father Luke, a Vietnam fighter pilot who knows he can't escape his violent nature ("I'm shit in the eyes of God"), are equally compelling—as is Oates's presentation of their helpless, mutually destructive love. But the novel has flaws, including occasionally slack writing and careless anachronisms. And in the character of the sexually charismatic cultist Enoch Skaggs, Oates draws another of the unconvincingly feverish caricatures that mar several of her more portentous stories. Nor does it seem necessary to spell out the source of Ingrid's sociopathic downward progression ("Crazy for men they say it's really your own daddy you seek").
Nevertheless, as in Mulvaneys , Oates shows us the paradoxical resilience that sustains people who endure more than we can imagine, and somehow hang on. Her boldly drawn grotesques reach out to us, making us believe in them and care about their fates.
