In Rough Country by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page A

and blueberry gems, and a couple of novelists who, although they wrote like dogs (according to the poets), had made packets, which, because they were decently (and properly) humble, they were complimented to share with the rarer breed.
    No more glamorous poet-figure than Theron Maybank, who attracts women with his “brilliant talk and dark good looks somehow reminiscent of the young Nathaniel Hawthorne” a casual anti-Semite (“I would never have a Jew as a close friend”) who nonetheless betrays his desperately vulnerable wife with a zaftig Jewish beauty, encourages her incipient alcoholism and hurtles her “off the brink on which [she] had hovered for so long into a chasm.” This late story of Stafford’s reads like recklessly disguised memoir, giving off sparks of raw, pained vitality in counterpoint to the more detached rhythms of “A Country Love Story,” its obvious predecessor, concluding with the most poignant of ritual deaths:
    We had killed Pretty Baby and killed her kittens. Theron himself had put them in a gunnysack and weighted it with stones and had rowed halfway out to Loon Islet and dropped them among the perch and the pickerel.
    Stafford is at her brilliant and tragic best in the unnerving mode of domestic Gothicism, but, elsewhere, she’s enormously funny, capable of withering satiric portraits as pitilessas those by Mary McCarthy, with whom she shares a zestful disdain for hypocrisy, pretension, and feminine “niceness.” The Manhattan-based stories “Children Are Bored on Sundays,” “Beatrice Trueblood’s Story,” and “The End of a Career” portray social types who verge upon caricature, while the obese, gluttonous egotist Ramona Dunn of “The Echo and the Nemesis” is a clownish type who shocks us with her sudden humanity. (Is Ramona an incest victim? Stafford seems to hint so, with admirable subtlety.) Lottie Jump, the aptly named shoplifter-friend of eleven-year-old Emily Vanderpool of “Bad Characters,” is a bold, brash daughter of Oklahoma migrant workers whose humanity registers upon us belatedly; so too, Angelica Early of “The End of a Career,” who is blinded by the world’s admiring yet condescending attention, fails to develop a personality and is devastated by even the first, mild ravages of aging: “her heart, past mending, had stopped.” (A virtual word-for-word replication of the ending of James’s The Turn of the Screw .) Several of Stafford’s memorable stories elude definition, striking a chord somewhere between comedy and horror: in “Cops and Robbers,” the drunken, bullying father of five-year-old Hannah takes her to a barber to have her beautiful long hair shorn, as a way of punishing her mother with whom he has a quarrel; in “The Captain’s Gift,” the elderly, genteel widow of an army general receives from her grandson, an army captain stationed in Germany in the early 1940s, an unexplained, alarming gift: “a braid of golden hair…cut off cleanly at the nape of the neck, and so long it must have hung below her waist.”
    The impersonal pronoun her , unobtrusively inserted here, is a typically chilling Stafford touch.
    In her wittily ironic view of humanity, Jean Stafford is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift for whom humankind was divided about evenly into “fools” and “knaves”—naive victims, evil aggressors. Stafford’s indignation is hardly less savage than Swift’s, though the terms of her moral satire are likely to be realistic. Her most mordant story, “A Modest Proposal,” takes its title from Swift’s famous satire, providing, in a milieu of rich Caucasian tourists in the Caribbean, the most extreme image in Stafford’s fiction: the “perfectly cooked boy”—a native, black baby victim of a house fire—offered to the racist Captain Sundstrom by a jovial friend:
    It