PARTISAN REVIEW
125
"People should let one another alone!" says jesse's grandfather.
Yes,
but he is wizened and mean in his aloneness. Oates's essentially
dramatic imagination has terrible hold of the truth - brutally un–
qualified in her work - that people can neither live with nor do with–
out one another. The epigraphs, from Borges and Yeats, are on the
world as phantasmagoria, as wonderland; but Oates has a novelist's
empiricism, and her characters keep knocking up against solid objects,
above all against the very real resistance of other people to their dreams.
Typically, though they keep discovering that they are strangers, her
people live too close. Their need for others is so violent that it defeats
itself.
It is an extreme view and part of her nihilism, but it is also
what
gives her work its raw grip.
Wonderland
is Jesse's story - his long attempt to convince himself
that
he is "not fated to confusion, chaos." Once he starts running from
his father's shotgun, he never stops, for when he does it will be to the
IOIllld of a shot. At times, slowing, he feels the terrible, pure open–
ness of his brain, which belongs to no one. Everything he sees on the
run is blurred; life is a dream. But at least he
is
too harried to discover
that he is no one at all, only an anonymous spirit entering his own
history.
Jesse is adopted into the gifted Pederson family. The father is a
doctor whose diagnoses are divinations. He wants to cure all the world.
And how American he is in feeling that his powers and good intentions
make it his. He is enormously fat, as if his bloated spirit had ballooned
his body. His two badgered, gifted children and his ungifted wife–
gross,
ravenous eaters all- are also fat, as if to fill the place where
his love should have been, or as if to make themselves too huge to go
down his greedy throat. There they all sit at the dining table, gobbling,
competing with their grinding jaws.
Unreal at first, the Pederson family is finally fascinating, a touch–
ing
and menacing achievement of the grotesque. The mother and
daughter, especially, are remarkable creations. Like almost all the rela–
tionships in
them
and
W
onderland
J
the Pedersons come breathtakingly
alive,
share the peculiar intensity of need and hatred, panic and cold–
ness, that helps give this novelist's work its force. Yet there is nothing
monotonous in this. Oates's characters live and change, are unstable, un–
predictable - compulsion, a felt
fate
of chaos, is the rule.
Jesse is rejected by Dr. Pederson when he helps Mrs. Pederson
escape the family. Yet, leaving Lockport, N.Y., he attends medical
dool
in
Michigan anyway, to become the second Dr. Pederson, as the
fat
genius had wished. Or does Jesse become Dr. Cady, a brilliant lec–
turer at the school? One day, enviously, he sees Cady walking with a
