Guilt and resurrection in a small town

Goth is never far from the surface in Joyce Carol Oates’ work. Even the author’s appearance — Raphaelite hair, waiflike frame, large pooling eyes — has long suggested a Romantic poetess drumming up tales of ghosts and foggy heaths, or a female Edgar Allen Poe. Even in her 70s, the author evokes a breathless, feverish tone in her prose.

In a town like Carthage, the title location of Oates’ latest novel, you might expect to see villagers with pitchforks and torches filling the bucolic town square or crossing wooden covered bridges. What has outraged them so is the disappearance of a girl, the teenaged daughter of former Carthage mayor, Zeno Mayfield. In truth, the town is out searching fields and surrounding woods for traces of Cressida, age 19; there are no pitchforks in sight, no torches ablaze. Rather, the Goth touches haunt the minds of the Mayfield family — mother Arlette, older daughter Juliet and Zeno — as well as the former fiancé of Juliet, Brett Kincaid, an Iraq War veteran who’s the prime suspect.

The Mayfields are a well-liked family, and for a while it seems Brett and Juliet will have a dream life together; but enlisting in the Iraq War after 9/11 leaves Brett battle-scarred, shell-shocked, brain-damaged and — haunted.

His life with Juliet can never be the same, because everyone who has not been in war seems dead to him, or as though they’ve already died. Like a lot of vets, Brett witnessed bad things, and bears the guilt and shame with him. Juliet, a Christian, tries to resurrect him and help Brett recover; but he grows bitter, drinks too much, does drugs. Friends and witnesses say he was seen with Juliet’s sister, Cressida, on the night she went missing; blood on the dashboard of his pickup truck suggests he was involved in her disappearance. Without a body, the whole town — but especially father Zeno — weighs heavily on wringing a confession from the tormented veteran.

Again, you can’t help thinking of those pitchforks and torches. Oates even brings up the subject of Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus, the novel by Romantic writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley that introduced the world to Frankenstein’s monster. In Shelley’s story, the monster was a creature of pity, scorned and cringed-at, guilty only of being created into a world it doesn’t understand. In Carthage, many characters fit that description. Brett Kincaid’s plight as a military weapon is likened to the Frankenstein myth; part of Oates’ message is that war shapes men into killing machines, Frankenstein monsters, yet doesn’t deal with the consequences when they return from hell and try to reenter the human world. Kincaid, with his broken face and damaged psyche, is a physical Frankenstein monster, but his heart’s torment is inarticulate, something Shelley never denied her creation: her monster could express his extreme isolation from mankind in eloquent words, set adrift on an arctic ice floe at the end of her novel.

Another version of Frankenstein surfaces in Cressida, the “smart” Mayfield daughter next to Juliet, considered the “pretty” one. Goth and emo to the max, “steeped in the ink of irony as if in the womb,” she’s sarcastic and cynical and creates intricate MC Escher-inspired pen and ink drawings that reveal her torturous alienation. For Cressida regards herself as ugly, unloved, and it’s this painful self-consciousness that leads to the novel’s not-so-unpredictable chain of events.

Ever literary, Oates’ novel abounds in allusions and motifs. When Brett is undergoing rehab after the war, “they shoveled and swept the parts of him back together,” a line echoing the language of Sylvia Plath’s haunting poem, “Daddy” (“But they pulled me out of the sack/And they stuck me together with glue”). Brett meets up with a pastor from The Church of the Good Thief, an allusion to Dismas, one of the men crucified next to Jesus, who sought His blessing and penitence (and eventually became the saint of men with no hope for redemption). There are references to Schrödinger’s cat, suggesting the uncertainty of Cressida’s fate, her unsettled memory in the consciousness of the Mayfields. Some King Lear allusions. All this gives Carthage literary heft, but it’s not her most seamless narrative ever; Oates’ prose does seem to proceed as in a fever dream, equally hushed and explosive at times. She’s still a deft surgeon with prose, rendering it expressionistic at times, naturalistic at others. Yet the novel lacks propulsion. And it seems like a plot we’ve come across before — the two sisters battling for male affirmation, almost like a female East of Eden.

Research is one key to understanding Carthage: Oates seems to have spent some time visiting a death row facility in Florida, for Cressida’s tour inside a death chamber is chillingly detailed. There’s also an almost casual familiarity with soldier thinking that allows her to tap into Brett’s knowing alienation: “Civilians are afraid of you. In their eyes you can see they expect you to hurt them.” It’s that fear of Frankenstein all over again.

As with many novels told from an omniscient perspective, we come to learn that nothing is cut and dried, not even innocence and guilt, in a place like Carthage. Assigning guilt is a tricky endeavor; who knows what drives people to do things, or drives them away? The old Carthage, in Tunisia, was a place of early Greek flowering; its modern American counterpart in Oates’ novel is a place of Greek tragedy, but with a sliver of space left for confession and resurrection. In that, it echoes Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Oates, as she often does, brings her female characters round to the community of women, a place of solace and understanding, where they can begin to grow and heal and recover. Others, men like Zeno, are left to their whiskey and stoic reserve, maintaining a brave face while repressing inner violence, the curse of manhood. It’s a literary battleground that Oates is rather familiar with, over the course of dozens of novels and short story collections. Yet what rescues Carthage from liberal polemic is a sense of omniscient forgiveness, of faith in God and “the cruel logic of His mercy,” and a general lingering tone that haunts you, at least a bit, after the case is wrapped up, and the torches and pitchforks are placed back in the shed.