Joyce Carol Oates lowers herself on to an overstuffed monster of a sofa as if she or the sofa might break. Lean of cheek and luminous of gaze, she looks like Emily Dickinson’s less substantial sister — an elegant wraith trapped in the clumpy Victoriana of a Kensington hotel.
A throat-hugging lace blouse and Venetian glass beads are pure essence of lady novelist. Yet Oates’s new novella, Rape: A Love Story, contains scenes of sexual violence so viscerally raw and immediate that, reading it, you feel physically winded, like the courtroom-movie witness who needs a glass of water and a chair.
It is an appropriate reaction. Rape: A Love Story is Oates’s outraged response to the US criminal justice system’s handling of sex crimes. “I feel like I’m bearing witness for victims who get caught up in the criminal justice system and don’t get any justice out of it,” she says. “I’m very sympathetic with victims. They tend to be often women and girls. And our criminal justice system is just not adequate to deal with victims; it ‘s more organised to protect the rights of the defendants.”
Related with forensic attention to detail, Rape: A Love Story is the fictional account of Teena Maguire, a lively single mother who is gang-raped by neighbourhood teenagers in the presence of her 12-year-old daughter. When the case comes to trial, Teena is represented by the defence attorney as little better than a prostitute. The “double ordeal” of rape and trial comes close to destroying her. But Teena has a protector — Dromoor, a gun-loving cop and Gulf War veteran who tracks down the rapists and kills them.
In the US, the title alone has provoked controversy. Oates, an acknowledged front-runner in the Great American Writer stakes, with an award-winning backlist of some 30 novels and short-story collections, had a hard job persuading her publishers that “rape” and “love” could comfortably share a dust jacket. “I wanted the title to imply a story in two parts,” she explains. “First, there is this violent act and cruelty; but then there is the love story, the idea that men are not just rapists — they can also be protective and very loving.”
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Perhaps more shocking to readers of liberal sensibilities is the idea, implicit in the novella, that justice is better served by Dromoor’s vigilante action than by the courts. Violence against women is a recurrent theme in Oates’s writing (most notably in Zombie, her 1995 novel about a serial killer). The aggressor/protector divide is a neat inversion of the Madonna/whore female stereotype — but can Oates really consider Dromoor, a man who hunts down teenagers and kills them in cold blood, a hero?
Calmly and a little sadly (though it might just be the dying fall of an upstate New York accent), Oates reviews the facts of the fictional case: “These rapists are not wonderful people who would have grown up and got better. They are precocious criminals who have no regard for other people; if they got away with Teena’s rape, it would give them a kind of validation. Probably a few years later they would do something else.”
“I wouldn’t call Dromoor a hero,” she goes on, “but he behaves heroically. I think that very often allegedly ordinary people can come forward and behave in a heroic manner. Of course, what he does is illegal, but I wouldn’t say it’s amoral. He’s acting in a moral way and Teena and her daugher require that morality; if Dromoor doesn’t take care of things, the woman will be completely destroyed; she will have to go on living in that same neighbourhood where her assailants live and it’s just an intolerable situation.”
Oates’s cool pragmatism sits oddly with her careful, almost dainty, manner. It is as if your bookish aunt had opened her reticule and whipped out a derringer. Her sense of avenging morality, she makes clear, has nothing to do with Old Testament values. She abhors the death penalty, not on principle, but because it is unjust.
“Capital punishment in the United States is simply unworkable. It’s a sentence which is given to poor people, who are black, in a state like Texas. So if you’re a white criminal you’re never probably going to be sentenced to death. It’s very horrible. America is filled with these contradictions of being a land of opportunity and a democracy and egalitarian, yet obviously we’re a capitalist country where money is power. We’re supposed to believe in one person one vote, but as far as our criminal justice system goes, the more money you have, the better your chances. O. J. Simpson had a very expensive team of lawyers, and it was their strategy to get an acquittal. There was no relationship to whether Simpson had been guilty or not. And I mean no relationship.”
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America, its sins and graces, is Oates’s great theme. Her 1970 novel Them dramatised the Detroit race riots; Black Water (1992) explored the murk of the Kennedy-Chappaquiddick scandal; while Blonde (1990), a fictionalised life of Marilyn Monroe, exposed the fragile glamour of Hollywood. Rape: A Love Story, like The Falls (2004), is set in the city of Niagara Falls, 20 miles from the farmland Oates grew up on. Teena Maguire ‘s Niagara Falls is not somewhere you’d care to spend a honeymoon: “It’s a place that’s very haunting to me,” says Oates. “Niagara Falls itself is beautiful, mesmerising, but the city of Niagara Falls was heavily industrialised in the Seventies and Eighties. Now the chemical companies have gone bankrupt and withdrawn, so the city is depopulated and poor. The mist from the falls goes into the city, and sometimes it’s shrouded and grey; the pollution from the city goes into the river. For some poetic reason, I find that very interesting. I wanted to suggest that, as the woman has been raped and mistreated, so the natural landscape has been raped and mistreated and exploited.”
Affinity with land — and the impulse to go West — is, says Oates, a deeply nationalist concept, going right back to the Puritans and the pioneers. “America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A land of complete newness is the oldest American dream.”
The dream has worked for Oates, the farm girl made good through hard work and education. “I’m a strong believer in the young adult revolutionising the self, getting away from home and discovering new possibilities,” she says. Born in 1938, Oates was sprung, by means of a scholarship, from a one-room schoolhouse in Lackport, Western New York State, to Syracuse University and thence to the University of Wisconsin where, in 1961, she met and married fellow academic Raymond J. Smith after a three-month courtship.
Academia is an ongoing romance; since 1978 Oates has lectured at Princeton (she holds the highly-regarded Roger S. Berlind humanities chair). She defines herself, with a kind of don’t-look-down superstition, as first and foremost a teacher; the novels, she insists, are not a profession, but a compulsion. “I don’t like to think of myself as a writer.” she says. “I think it sounds self-aggrandising and pretentious.”
Certainly it is hard to imagine a writer less authorial than Oates. “I have often felt,” she once told a flummoxed interviewer, “that I’m a very neutral being and that I have almost no personality.” Certainly, with her ethereal-goth appearance and air of distracted melancholy, she seems, at times more like a medium for her characters than their creator.
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“Because of my background, I feel very comfortable at different levels of society. And I’m very interested in people who are not at all like me. Someone like Dromoor interests me very much as a certain kind of American man who loves guns. I don’t love guns. I don’t own any guns. But to try to write about someone very different to me and to try to invest him with some sympathy, that is very fascinating to me.” “Literature,” she says, like someone repeating an article of faith, “is all about enlarging our sympathies.”
Trips from the ivory tower, she feels, are good for the health of a teacher moonlighting as a writer. When We Were the Mulvaneys, Oates’s novel about sexual abuse, was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s book club programme, it opened new territories of literary appreciation, where readers didn’t give a damn for textual analysis but would stay up all night to finish the book and write a tear-stained letter of thanks to the author in the morning. “I thought it was a very genuine way to respond to literature. I was meeting readers of a kind who would never normally read me — and they may never read me again — but they were reading me because of Oprah and this was wonderful.”
More recently, while Manhattan literati debated the ethics of Rape: A Love Story, Oates was invited to speak at a rape crisis centre in Arizona. “There must have been about 200 women and girls and they were all either rape victims or were there with family members who had been raped. They thought that the way Teena was treated by the court and in the neighbourhood was very realistic. They liked that Teena isn’t a saint — she’s a woman who goes out with another woman’s husband, a woman who likes to drink and have a good time. Yet she was raped and she was treated badly. And I think a lot of the women who were victims could identify with her.
“We had,” Oates recalls, “a very intense and somewhat exhausting experience. And,” she adds with something like pride, “it had nothing to do with literature.”
For the first time in an hour, Oates appears acutely, almost dazedly, aware of her own powers. Maybe, her modest smile concedes, A Great American Writer is not such a bad thing to be.
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Rape: A Love Story, by Joyce Carol Oates (Carroll & Graf Publishers, £9.99; offer £8.49, 0870 1608080)