Joyce Carol Oates straddles the literary and the popular. The novelist teaches writing at Princeton, yet you can imagine her books being read by travelers at airports. Prolific as a knock 'em out genre writer, her productivity stands in contrast—and rebuke—to those who question whether a novel can have any value unless it’s been labored over for years like an unpromising acre that refuses to yield much fruit. Oates apparently doesn’t wait for the muse but goes looking for her.
With her latest novel, My Life as a Rat, Oates explores the story of Violet Rue Kerrigan, a working class girl from the unpromising Rust Belt town of South Niagara. As the story begins, the 12-year old is the youngest of seven children in an Irish, ostensibly Roman Catholic family where clan loyalty trumps all other values. She overhears two of her older brothers discuss killing a high school classmate, a black student. After she inadvertently lets their story slip out, she is ostracized as well as traumatized by the reaction of her family (and much of society). Violet Rue (her name screaming regret on the page?) is sent away to a sympathetic aunt in a dismal nearby upstate New York town.
The condition of women in a society still dominated by men, and the peculiar dynamics of family life, heave seldom been far from Oates’ concerns. Although My Life as a Rat is ostensibly about the moral choice between exposing wrongdoing and the code of silence, it’s really about the life of a girl—even if she hadn’t “ratted out” her brothers—whose few options are largely subject to the shifting moods of emotionally damaged men. Violet Rue’s life doesn’t repeat her mother’s, who cleaned houses on her knees as a teenager and married as a way out of a dead end and into a cul-de-sac, but the rhyming scheme set by mom’s example is in play.
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Oates is especially effective in picturing the internal life, the self-perceptions of Violet Rue, as memories and fears from the past crisscross her uncertain path into the future. The prose never bogs down and as the story pushes forward, the reader is eager to be pulled along. My Life as a Rat is keenly aware of the feelings of its female characters and the dangerous ways of men, their erratic, frustrated outbursts and insatiable desire for some form of sexual gratification.
The problem at times: Violet Woe might be a better name for the protagonist. It’s plausible that the vulnerable, friendless girl in a new school could be taken advantage of by her math teacher, but does he have to be a Nazi? And if he has to be, would he really hold forth on the hierarchy of races and the necessity of eugenics as he slips her into a drug-induced stupor? Sometimes, Oates doesn’t know when bad enough is good enough.
My Life as a Rat includes many meaningful sideways glances at other issues, wondering whether mindless video game violence has any ties to the unthinking violence of Violet Rue’s brothers. Oates correctly records the currents of class resentment and racial backlash that run like live wires under American society. My Life as a Rat is a #me2 novel set in the near past, a wise choice in a chaotic present day where changes come too fast to be nailed down by any medium as languorous as the novel.
