Joyce Carol Oates Has Still Got It

If people took the old adage “it’s the thought that counts” more seriously, there would surely be consequences for many of the characters that Joyce Carol Oates has brought to life in the stories gathered in Flint Kill Creek.

These men and women already have their fair share of woes, stuck as they are in unhappy relationships, dead-end jobs, and the deceptively soothing embrace of drink and drugs. Not since the passing of Russell Banks has an American author delved into blue-collar despair with more painful honesty.

But over and over in Oates’s delineation of human psychology, thoughts and urges emerge that her protagonists fight to suppress. Her subject is that flashpoint where dark and dangerous ideas hold out the prospect of life-altering consequences if characters even once lose the will to resist them. Our legal system, however severely corrupted, still makes broad distinctions between what people think and what they do.

In “The Nice Girl,” a couple and their younger daughter go on a search for her troubled and estranged older sibling. That they have only a vague idea of the latter’s whereabouts does not make the hunt any easier. Oates’s evocation of the setting that this and other stories in the collection share—a run-down, desolate upstate New York—is more haunting than Stephen King’s New England. Where King distracts readers with vampires and killer clowns so he can slip in his theme of humans as the ultimate monsters, like a switchblade in the back, Oates serves the brutal message straight up, with no equivocations.

The three searchers come upon a weathered, decaying house where the older daughter may be, but no one will answer the door. They guess that she might be upstairs somewhere, prone, helpless, too chemically altered to answer knocks or even respond to calls from the street. If they enter the house, someone inside might shoot them. At this point, the husband and wife—mild spoiler—decide to send the younger daughter to do a stealth wellness check. She is small enough to get in through a loose window and see what she can find.

But, this being an Oates story, the relationships among the characters are complex, and the junior sibling, who performs well in school without causing problems for her parents, does not love the older one unreservedly. So fierce are her resentments, in fact, that the nice girl even entertains thoughts of harming her sister if she does find her in this filthy dump of a house. Does being a nice girl mean infinite patience and tolerance for those who do not lead moral lives, and whose selfish behavior endangers those who do? The question will haunt readers as much as it does Oates’s subjects.

Variants of this question present themselves in the story “Late Love,” about a marriage’s growing strains and the homicidal ideation to which the partners fall prone. With little dialogue, this story unfolds with the rising suspense and dread of a German Expressionist silent film.

Another tale that deals in sly questions of agency and intent is the titular one, “Flint Kill Creek.” Here is one of the most haunting evocations of upstate New York in any recent work of fiction. Like “The Nice Girl,” this story culminates in an effort to track down a wayward character. In this case, a vain young man named Ron hopes to catch up with a girl, Inga. She fascinates him but spurns his efforts to pursue her on a trail near the village of Oriskany, in Oneida County, as the approach of a hurricane turns the weather treacherous.

Anyone who witnessed or heard about the storms that ravaged Oneida, Warren, and Hamilton Counties over the summer, tearing roofs off homes, sending branches flying, and displacing a 91-ton B-52 bomber at Griffiss Air Force Base, will have a sense of the awesome natural forces that “Flint Kill Creek” evokes.

At the climax, when a character walks on the rail of a bridge, Oates again develops that tension between buried urge and conscious agency. When one of the protagonists (another mild spoiler) moves to grab the other, things do not turn out well, but it would be hard to blame either for what happens. As in Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy, the subtle narration of the climax presents different interpretations for readers who “witness” it than those who read a bland account of it in a newspaper might reach.

The moral complexity that is Oates’s subject derives largely from the ability of a person to walk and chew gum at the same time, or to hold two opposing ideas at once and, potentially, act on the one that the individual knows to be far less in line with his or her impulses.

Here is what lends much of the work in Flint Creek Kill its timeliness. In recent weeks, America’s insurance industry, and the extreme, lethal actions that one young man allegedly took, reportedly out of outrage over its perceived abuses and excesses, have been in the headlines.

In certain of the stories in this book, Oates’s subject is not the insurance industry but adjacent ones—hospitals and healthcare. Stories in this vein include “The Phlebotomist,” in which a woman leaving a clinic suffers the advances of a highly aggressive employee, who supposedly represents a Hippocratic order that respects certain inviolable rules about the relations between medical professionals and the people they treat. Then there’s the chilling “Bone Marrow Donor,” in which a woman hoping to save the life of her terminally ill husband takes bad advice from doctors about what she can expect if she opts to undergo a transplant for his ostensible benefit.

In these tales, a medical establishment betrays people of humble origins conditioned to treat doctors with reverence and trust their wisdom and impartiality. Yet Oates’s point of view is clear. Nothing that happens in these stories justifies doing evil.

Joyce’s timeless message is that people are complex, self-aware, and, in even the most desperate and daunting circumstances, possess agency. There is a universe of difference between thinking of doing something and doing it. We have to be greater and nobler than our most evil and twisted urges. We have to. The alternative is cowardice, depravity, the end of everything worth living for.