• Chapter 10: Late Twentieth Century and Postmodernism Joyce Carol Oates 1938-

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"Joyce Carol Oates Takes On Racism and Grief in Her New Novel (Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.)."
NYTimes Review by Bret Anthony Johnston, June 9, 2020

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Source: Princeton University

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June 9, 2020

NIGHT. SLEEP. DEATH. THE STARS.
By Joyce Carol Oates
789 pp. Ecco/Harper Collins. $35.

By Bret Anthony Johnston

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author, most recently, of the novel “Remember Me Like This.”

In the decades since her National Book Award-winning novel, “Them,” a searing critique of class structure that culminates with the Detroit race riots, Joyce Carol Oates has engaged the subjects of race, violence and socioeconomic status with intermittent success. Her seminal essays on Mike Tyson are layered and poignant; “The Sacrifice,” a 2015 novel inspired by the Tawana Brawley case, was marred by a lack of empathy and worse.

“Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.” is the latest installment in Oates’s uneven examination of cultural identity in America, arriving as protests over the killing of George Floyd have erupted in cities across America. The novel begins with John Earle McClaren — Whitey, to everyone who knows him — stopping on the highway when he sees a couple of police officers roughing up a “dark-skinned” man. Whitey is 67, a well-heeled husband and father of five grown children, former mayor of historic Hammond, N.Y., and, well, white. The man being assaulted is Indian, seemingly detained because the patrolmen mistook him for black.

Whitey intervenes out of “moral obligation,” a virtuous impulse that gets him Tased. He has a stroke and eventually dies. The loss is tragic and immense, and it unmoors his family. What follows is roughly 650 pages of the McClarens keening and raging, and betraying, to varying degrees, their own racist and elitist predilections.

Take, for example, Beverly and Lorene, the eldest McClaren daughters, squabbling over the rightful heir to the mink coat Whitey had given their mother, Jessalyn, a $15,000 garment the widow now wants rid of. Beverly — a suburban mom who’s increasingly petty, incensed and potty-mouthed — has spared the coat the indignity of a Goodwill donation. Lorene — a high school principal who’s shockingly manipulative, vindictive and self-harming — is furious that Beverly called dibs.

When Jessalyn starts dating, the sisters are appalled by their mother’s boyfriend. Hugo Martinez — whom they regularly call Ramirez — is an accomplished poet-photographer, a courtly gentleman born in Newark. Here’s Lorene: “How would Mom ever meet a Cuban? Our housemaids were Filipino and the lawn crew men are Mexicans, I think.” The sisters are certain he’s after the McClaren dough.

As is big brother. Since his father’s death, Thom — “Uncle Thom” to his nieces — has also become obsessed with the offending officers being brought to justice, either through the legal system or by his own hand. He’s dim and successful, given to bullying and bribery and not a little paternalistic misogyny. He stalks and intimidates the man his father stopped to help. He fires and intimidates a woman his father had been mentoring. When he takes an especially low road and pushes Hugo to leave Jessalyn, Hugo responds with savvy and satisfying grace. Aghast, Thom dismisses his play as “some sort of Mexican-peasant-nobility like — who had it been? Zapata?”

The other two McClaren children are somewhat more nuanced, but equally undone. Virgil, a wayward artist, is initially buoyed by an attraction to a male peer and then gutted when his advances are rejected. Sophia, a promising research scientist, swears off experimenting on animals in response to Whitey’s death. In one of the novel’s most harrowing scenes, Sophia is pulled over for reckless driving. The officer is cartoonishly vile, hectoring and humiliating her, but the encounter also exposes Sophia’s rotten core. “At least,” she thinks, “my skin is white.”

Oates is at her best — and make no mistake, her best can be spellbinding and heart-wrenching — when she inhabits Jessalyn. Widowhood besieges her, and “in the siege she has lost everything.” She sleepwalks, talks to herself and dreads the ringing phone because the caller, “no matter the voice, will not be the voice.” She tosses Whitey’s top-shelf liquor, but secrets his pills away. Jessalyn is constantly searching, for her keys, her wallet, her husband’s cemetery plot or for anything to fill the Whitey-size void in her life — a homeless man, a feral cat, a gentle and savvy poet-photographer.

Jessalyn is also resilient, hopelessly so, but as anyone devastated by loss will attest, and as Oates makes achingly clear, resilience is typically more burden than blessing. “At her most unhappy,” Oates writes of Jessalyn, “she remained sane. Was that her punishment? — an irrevocable and implacable sanity?” It’s a revelatory moment in a disquieting novel.

For a variety of reasons — the considerable length, or what Oates herself has called her “dismaying proliferousness,” or, most unfairly, the fate of being published in the age of Covid-19 — readers may resist this book. Still, it is squarely in conversation with this moment. The disease coursing through the McClaren blood has plagued this country for centuries, and we’ve failed miserably at slowing the spread, let alone finding a cure. It has led to the unconscionable murder of Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and innumerable others, and explains why the coronavirus is disproportionately claiming black and Hispanic lives.

“The victims were almost exclusively persons of color, white-skinned citizens were rarely targeted and could not imagine what all the fuss was over,” Oates writes. It’s an apt and shameful indictment. And too forgiving. The problem isn’t an inability to imagine, but a patent and systemic refusal. Such failure is willful, and if we tolerate its myriad manifestations — apathy, privilege, ignorance — we’re as complicit as the McClarens. Without swift and sweeping change, there will be no justice, no peace.