Poor little mad girl
Miranda France
MAN CRAZY by Joyce Carol Oates Virago, £15.99, pp. 282 Joyce Carol Oates has written so many novels — more than 30 at the last count that she has been known to apologise for her prolificity as though it were promiscu- ity. Quickly written, her neo-gothic novels read quickly too, providing an enjoyably nasty frisson in the process.
Man Crazy is no exception. Here the nar- ration belongs to a disturbed young woman called Imogen. At five, we learn, Imogen was so promising her less intelligent par- ents called her `Smartass'. By her late teens, in terrible contrast, she was answer- ing to 'Dog-girl', the nickname coined for her by a vicious biker gang.
What went wrong, and how? For starters, Imogen is the fruit of a precarious relationship. Her father, a Vietnam veteran and now a murderer on the run, appears only occasionally at the hideout he has arranged for his wife and daughter. Even then he proffers a disconcerting mix of love and violence. He wants to reform, Dad promises the infant Imogen, but 'blowing off guys' heads' is such a darned conve- nient way of solving problems. Imogen's young and beautiful mother solves hers more conventionally, with drink and a little discreet prostitution.
Poor Imogen. At school she is bright, but so gauche that teachers accuse her of cheating in tests and other children mock her. She comes to find catharsis in self- disfigurement. This mostly takes the form of scratching, which is so important to her that it often appears in capitals: SCRATCHING. The other word accorded capitals is MOTHER, which gives some clue to the source of her trauma (by now they have run away from the runaway mur- derer/father).
There is one terrible scene in which Imo- gen is due to read her prize-winning poem aloud on stage, and MOTHER is meant to be there, but may not bother to come. Imo- gen's anxiety about the merit of the poem and her mother's presence in the audience provoke a bout of SCRATCHING, and public humiliation follows, as blood pours down her face on stage.
When Imogen becomes a teenager, scratching evolves into injecting. She seeks masochistic solace in drugs and degrading sex. She seems doomed, also, by a bleak environment that includes a quarry where a man once drowned and a squalid river where the body of a murdered woman has been found, so badly battered that it is unrecognisable. At the local shooting club, boys 'breathless and hooting' run after the injured pigeons and break their necks for a quarter a time. Miss Oates knows how to provide nasty furnishings for her stories. She always lets you know about the rotten fences, the dumps and the debris that make for a menacing atmosphere.
So much for what went wrong — Imo- gen's home life, school life and sex life have all played their dismal part. What is harder to gauge is the 'how' of her deterio- ration. The narrator makes very rare allu- sions to her symptoms, such as her conviction that she is dirty or her revulsion against pink meat. Once she mentions a fear of God, from whose constant gaze it is impossible to escape.
We learn of these neuroses, yet we do not observe their development. Imogen's narra- tive voice is so detached, so coolly descrip- tive, that there is no real inkling either of the child's confusion or of the teenager's growing self-hatred. You could argue that this is a function of her mental state — the detachment is her self-defence or, to put a psychoanalyst's spin on it, she has no `insight' into her illness. 'I erased and forgot, erased and forgot, many things,' she admits.
All the same, if an author centres a plot on the evolution of a character's mental breakdown, she cannot then let that char- acter completely block its revelation to the reader. In the United States, Man Crazy has been compared to such classics of men- tal illness as The' Bell Jar, but Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel is a much more painful, credible read.
Man Crazy is a well crafted gothic tale, intense and scary, a page-turner. It is not a convincing study of mental illness.
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