The title of Joyce Carol Oates’ fifty-ninth
novel is extracted from Walt Whitman’s A Clear Midnight, which ends with:
“pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars.”
These themes, indeed, subsist throughout Oates’s narrative, and one might even
say that Oates loves them best, too. They are the pilot light for the array of
deep burning topics that her nearly 800-paged book undertakes. The book is a
fictional addition to Oates’s A Widow’s Story: A Memoir. It is a book that
is politically engaged, tackling prejudice, class, vanity, family, purpose, and
of course, death. Oates’s novel is about life in white America at the end of 2010,
and it’s so extensive that a graduate-level English literature seminar would
fail to discuss all of its machinations.
اضافة اعلان
The story begins in the latter half of
Obama’s first term when John Earle “Whitey” McClaren (who voted for Obama)
stops his vehicle on the shoulder of the expressway in hopes of helping a
brown-skinned man who is being brutalized by the police –– the same police that
Whitey backed when he was mayor of Hammond, New York. Whitey is excessively
tasered by the police. He has a stroke and falls into a coma. It is affective
reading given the killing of George Floyd, whose death is just one in a country
with a long history of state-sanctioned murder. Jelani Cobb, staff writer
at The New Yorker, writes that “it’s both necessary and,
at this point, pedestrian to observe that policing in this country is mediated
by race.” Oates’s story, then, seems like a necessary one, especially for white
readers who do not believe that it is pedestrian. The difficulty in Oates’s
story is the fact that Whitey is rather unmistakeably white, while victims of
police brutality are disproportionately Black.
Whitey, who like his nickname evinces a
certain complacency and peace of mind about the implications of Blackness,
represents an idealism in the American story that ignores issues of race and,
ironically, police brutality. When Whitey is taken down, the romanticism
evaporates, exposing the pretence in the lives of his family. Without belief,
Whitey’s widow, Jessalyn and her five grown-up children –– Thom, Beverly, Lorene,
Virgil, and Sophia –– begin to experience an existential crisis.
Oates’s writing is nearly flawless. Her pen
is so brilliant that any reader may believe that they actually know what it is
like to be in a coma. Not only does every metaphor hit, but she has perfected
her stream of consciousness technique. Her use of fragments and jettisoning of
pronouns and verbs mirrors the disjointed and lightning-quick chain reaction
that our brains perform before and after interactions and in the moments
between dialogue –– the moments of listening, not listening, feeling, and
thinking. The result is a rather complex and life-like portrayal of a family,
with all its history, motivations, and reaction to death and the stars.
Oates makes such an interrogation of vanity
that has not been done since William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
Her novel speaks with his, but by allying vanity with racial prejudice she
takes it a step further –– Oates exposes how decorum and appearances are an
underlying motivation that is often couched in moralizing arguments. For
example, Jessalyn’s daughters act like they are worried about their mother’s
fragility while they are actually concerned with judgment from neighbours and
losing their inheritance to their mother’s new Hispanic friend. Mixed up within
that vanity is a smokescreen of complicity. The McClarens, especially Whitey
and Thom, in order to hold on to their vanity, actively ignore truths and hold
on to romanticized versions of their stories. This requires withholding certain
information the family has spent much effort “not wanting to know”, and so
after a large chunk of time passes, entire histories are ignored and prejudices
kept.
Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. shares
another characteristic with works of fiction from the Victorian era. The night
theme is constituted through gothic imagery at the family house on Old Farm
Road. For most of the story, Jessalyn lives alone in the huge property like an
abandoned, haunted mansion, with nothing but a stray, black, one-eyed tomcat to
keep her company. But it is at night when others are at the house that it gets
creepy, and Jessalyn’s name for the cat, “Mack the Knife”, foreshadows
moroseness and eventual violence.
Read more Lifestyle
.jpg)
.jpg)
