Soul at the White Heat by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

That there was something inside Fern I didn’t know. That I didn’t know her in the way I’d always thought I did. That Fern had secrets and not the good kind.

Rosemary will learn years later that there are other, equally alarming incidents involving Fern which she witnessed—but claimed not to recall: bitings, a savage and unprovoked attack against a graduate student, a lawsuit against the university.

Once a loquacious little girl, like her simian twin a whirligig of energy, by the time we meet Rosemary Cooke she has become a stunted and suppressed young woman of college age, whose “monkey-girlishness” is in such denial that she has a panic attack while watching “The Man in the Iron Mask,” a parable of twins—“Something was rising from the crypt, and what I did know was that I didn’t want to see what it was.”

By limiting her narration to Rosemary’s perspective, Fowler has sacrificed the myriad possibilities of alternative points of view that might have made of the story something more than a domestic catastrophe not unlike any exploration of a childhood trauma—death, loss, betrayal, abuse, incomprehension—that has crippled the survivor for life; the more considerable achievements of The White Bone and Project Nim arise in part from their wider range of viewpoints, which amplify and deepen their subjects. But Fowler’s decision allows for the emotional intensity of narrowness, as in the quintessential contemporary memoir in which crisis, collapse, and resolution are the point, not an amplitude of experience or illumination, even as the novel’s trajectory suggests the coming-of-age ritual of the young adult novel in which, in the end, there is uplift, and hope: Rosemary is reconciled with her mother, with whom she has written a children’s book about Fern; she has become a kindergarten teacher (“as close to living with a chimp troop as I’ve been able to get so far”); she and her mother live near Fern, now kept at an animal sanctuary in —. The novel ends with a poignant image, the more precious as it is transient, of sister-sister affirmation, when Rosemary visits Fern after an interval of twenty-two years, bearing a poker-chip talisman of their childhood:

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