PARTISAN REVIEW
127
sickly-sweet communal life. The fact is that even at its weakest
Wonder–
land
is enlivening and jarring.
A
more limited objection: the conclusion, while powerful, makes
one balk. Oates sends a weeping Jesse and his liver-diseased daughter
drifting downriver in a boat, merely remarking at the close that a
Royal Mounted Police vessel picked the boat up the next morning.
After George Eliot's drifting boats can a serious artist risk another?
Any why isn't Jesse rushing Shelley to a hospital? Has he broken down,
or is he certain, as a doctor, that she will die regardless? Or are we
not expected to ask? Yet it is the sort of conclusion that shakes one
even as one resists it. It gives a final, summary image of helplessness,
of the failure of human relations. It says, without quite saying it, what
the book as a whole has demonstrated (as a mallet demonstrates a
rap), that not all the will and rude health in the world will prevent
the pain of an unfinished identity, will
conclude
anything, protect the
rawly exposed spirit or keep those we have stacked against the flood of
anonymity, like sandbags at a dam, from being carried away by death,
or simply by their difference from us, their need to be themselves.
Jesse's "triumph" over his daughter's addict "husband" comes to no–
thing. Everything he has done comes to nothing. At the end it is as
if
he had never absorbed anything into himself at all. Hasn't he all
along just spilled on like the river?
The supreme attraction, the essential originality of
Wonderland,
as
of
them,
is its dramatic unpeeled quality. Everything in it seems loaded,
exposed, veined and vulnerable yet opaque, like a skinless plum. The
scenes and characters (even the minor figures) are fully there without
being contained. They are uncovered rather than delineated, broken
into, never packaged. Oates's style, correspondingly, .is inventive and
continually fresh without being sharp or self-alerting - it is not a
stylist's style. Seriously, steadily, it reveals, reveals; it is the perfect
medium for her empathic imagination.
What a shame were
Wonderland
to be neglected or resisted be–
cause
them
made so recent an impact. In achievement it is more or less
the equal of the earlier book, and the two together, like the gifted and
cnonnous Pederson children, are distinct yet related wonders.
Calvin Bedient
