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CALVIN
BEDIENT
young woman on the street. His wife? No, his daughter; but Jesse soon
makes her
his
wife. Jesse keeps snuggling into others - into "fathers,"
into what he will someday be - as if to hide from his appalling name.
lessness, his openness to life. He
wants
to be eaten (after leaving the
Pedersons, he even becomes lean). He next attempts to take on the
identity of Dr. Perrault, a renowned brain surgeon in Chicago, where
Jesse interns. Abrasive and impersonal, Perrault defines personality
as
"the promise of disease" before confidently dismissing it as an illusion,
to Jesse's furtive relief. It is a hellish, unreal strain, after all, to have
to be someone, just as it is terrifying to be no one at all: this double
truth is the poisonous little spider at -the dark bottom of the book.
Jesse becomes Perrault's associate, is virtually adopted once more. But
later death steals this formidable support away. Jesse has long since
turned cold on his flesh-shy, fiercely self-anxious wife; he pursues a
certain Reva Denk - charmingly created - then abandons her when
she gives in; and finally there is only his favorite daughter Shelley,
who, unlike Jesse, does not at all want to be eaten or to identify with
a father, and who runs off at fifteen in order to wipe literally every·
thing out of her mind.
The truth
is
that the plot of
Wonderland,
in any kind of outline
one might make, could not accurately convey the content. The book
is even less conventionally structured than
them,
which aspired to the
supposed formlessness of life; and for a while it seems a lesser book
because of it, until its imaginative logic makes itself felt. The strengths
of both books are largely independent of sustained suspense. Oates
does not so much tell stories or even create a world as dramatize a
state of the spirit: that inner scream of anxiety as the avalanche loosens
and begins to descend - the crush of poverty and family in
them;
of
flesh, other Americans and again of family in
Wonderland.
Like
them, Wonderland
is a trifle slow in coming alive. But
this
is perhaps not a fault; a book must get started.
If
the novel has a
major weakness it is that the final section, which suddenly gives us
the adolescent Shelley, is underdeveloped. The interest is deflected too
much from Jesse himself, who begins to run a little thin. True, one
soon becomes as absorbed with Shelley as with any of the other char·
acters - but so much so that one wants to know more about what
went wrong in her early life. What has made her so extreme? Still,
the tension mounts, Shelley's letters to her father become increasingly
hazy, her sweet spirit going strange like the red sun in smog,
and
when Jesse catches up with her (did Oates need to equip
him,
porten·
tuously, with a pistol?), there are stunning glimpses of stoned.out,
