THE WITCH OF EXMOOR
By Margaret Drabble
Harcourt Brace, 281 pages, $23
MAN CRAZY
By Joyce Carol Oates
Dutton, 282 pages, $23.95
Margaret Drabble and Joyce Carol Oates are not writers one ordinarily thinks of as similar, yet both draw deeply for inspiration from the complex dynamics of family relations and from contemporary culture. Their differences are a reflection of the radically differing texture of British and American life and of the differing novelistic traditions that undergird their work: the English social chronicle and the American romance. An admirer of Drabble’s work, Oates commented more than 20 years ago that Drabble captures “the tone of contemporary English culture.” Since that time, Drabble has only refined this skill. In her 13th novel, “The Witch of Exmoor,” Drabble is at the height of her considerable powers as chronicler of contemporary English life, although she does not paint a very pretty picture of it.
This highly readable novel, Drabble’s first in five years and a considerable departure from her last, “The Gates of Ivory,” is a compelling story of the quotidian lives of the Palmer siblings–Daniel, Grace (“Gogo”) and Rosemary–all married, successful, professional, middle-age and middle-class Londoners in late-20th Century England who come together to obsess on What to Do About Mother. At the heart of the novel is their mother, Frieda Haxby Palmer, the eccentric matriarch who, after a successful career as a writer, “social analyst, prophet, sage and sibyl,” has cut herself off from her children and grandchildren and the larger world to write her memoirs in a dilapidated mansion on the craggy edge of Exmoor overlooking the Bristol Channel. Interjected into the contemporary urban lives of the Palmer family, then, are disturbing Gothic elements: a decaying mansion, mystery, suspense, foreboding, dark family secrets and a quixotic “mad” mother whom they dub the “witch of Exmoor.”
In truth, Frieda Palmer isn’t so much mad as she is caustically misanthropic: “She would remove herself. Urban life was poisonous. The air was impure, the foodstuffs were contaminated. Madness had fallen on the land and she had caught it. People could no longer tell the good from the bad. You only had to look around to see that they were suffering from a terminal disease. They crowded together to die, like a species intent on extinction.” Her sweeping indictment encapsulates both society and family. She harbors deep resentments of her dead mother and sister and long-absent husband; and she has shockingly little regard for her children and grandchildren alike. She retains only a mild faith in her son-in-law, David D’Anger, a handsome, charismatic, successful politician of Guyanese origins who is at least theoretically interested in social justice, and she is fond of his son, the precocious Benjamin, to whom, it is revealed after her death, she leaves her estate, a legacy that seems to promise more grief than fulfillment. Indeed, embittered, unforgiving, vengeful, Frieda “had sown perpetual dissension like dragon’s teeth. She had set her family at war.” Her life and death cast destructive reverberations within her family during the course of the novel.
But then, her disgust with her family and the contemporary world isn’t unjustified. Like several other of Drabble’s late novels, this one is narrated by a chatty, omniscient narrator who finds much to lament in the world and the characters she sets before us: “Greed and selfishness have become respectable. Like family jealousy, they are not new, but they have gained a new sanction. It is now considered correct to covet. And Daniel is covetous. I am sorry to have to say this about a man who seems so generous, so agreeable, so drily distanced from all things ugly, a man so free with his tennis court and his wife’s cooking. But it is so. He is covetous, and he is mean.”
The novel is reminiscent in many ways of Forster’s “Howards End.” It is about a culture in decline, about the pervading poisons of urbanization and commercialism and self-serving privilege. It raises questions about who shall inherit the land and who shall work for social justice. Here it is the middle-class, white culture that is desiccated. If there is hope to be found and connections to be made, it is with a grafting of a “new genes line” onto the Anglo-Saxon. David, Rosemary’s husband, an outsider who is ethnically and racially different, is much more vital and attractive both physically and ethically than his mean-spirited brother-in-law, Daniel. David’s son Benjamin will inherit the Exmoor estate and perhaps his father’s longings for a just society.
But “The Witch of Exmoor” is not a particularly hopeful novel. Only in its rather odd closing chapter, “Envoi,” where some of the characters find themselves in heaven, is contentment to be found.
Although Drabble’s playfully intrusive omniscient voice is sometimes a little coy and cloying (and it certainly distances us from the characters), she spins a compelling yarn, one that becomes a downright pot-boiler as the novel draws to a dramatic and surprising climax. What makes the book so satisfying to read is Drabble’s deft, supple language and her omnipresent wit and wisdom. “The Witch of Exmoor” is a lively, if sobering, addition to her multinovel chronicle of late-20th Century English culture.
“Man Crazy,” Oates’ 27th novel, depicts familiar Oatesian terrain. Like her last two novels, “We Were the Mulvaneys” and “First Love,” and innumerable novels and short stories before, “Man Crazy” focuses on the quintessential Oatesian experience: the violated innocence of a young girl. And it is set in the back-country towns of upstate New York, Oates’ now-familiar fictional world of haunting verisimilitude.
Ingrid Boone, we learn in the first chapter, is recovering from trauma and drug abuse in the psychiatric-services division of a women’s detention center. She is urged by the doctor to, “Tell me of your life, Ingrid. We want to make you well.” The rest of the novel is her retrospective telling of that life to the doctor, in vivid vignettes, from age 5 through her childhood and adolescent years up through her involvement with a satanic cult at age 19.
Although Ingrid’s parents are loving, their life is unstable and unpredictable. Her handsome father, Lucas, deeply affected by the Vietnam War, is troubled and in trouble; he is an intermittent, disruptive, at times violent presence in his family’s life. Chloe, Ingrid’s beautiful mother, uses her sexual attractiveness as a means of survival as she and her daughter move from town to town fleeing the trouble that eventually meets up with them. Fragile, confused, anxious and insecure, Ingrid tries to piece together an inchoate understanding of herself and the world around her.
Most centrally, she seeks to be liked and accepted. Each time they move, she “counts up” the friends she makes at school. She treasures memories of her father and even appropriates some of her mother’s experiences as her own to impress her friends. Indeed, Ingrid realizes that her obsession with being liked by boys and men is really a quest for her father: “Crazy for men they say it’s really your own daddy you seek. I hope this is so, maybe someday I’ll find him.”
She is delighted to discover “how popular ” she is in high school. The attention of young and not-so-young men flatters and comforts her and validates her tenuous existence: “a guy’s strong hands cradling your head, stroking your hair, gazing at you close-up like a lover on TV or in the movies like you exist, you are there.” But as often as not, the experience turns ugly and threatening, not unlike encounters with her father: “But sometimes the hands were hurtful, and the guy too drunk and you’re not smashed enough not to be scared, and running stumbling sobbing and puking beer across a snow debris-littered field to the rear of a neighbor’s house and so through to Mohawk Street and back home where Momma was not waiting anyway.”
She has no faith in herself and her abilities: “You’re stupid. You’re a bad girl. White trash.” A high school English teacher, Mrs. Elsworth, insists she has literary talent and encourages her. In fact, Ingrid wins the high school poetry prize, but, convinced of her poem’s worthlessness, she cannot face reciting it before the assembled student body. In vividly rendered detail, she describes her feverish attempts to find and substitute another poem, which she reads to the assembly in drugged terror “without comprehension like a brain damaged person” with blood streaming down the side of her face from her self-mutilating, nervous scratching.
Eventually, she finds masochistic identity only in denigration and abuse by men. The nadir of her experience is her involvement with Enoch Skaggs, a brutish and mesmerizing satanic cult leader, a self-appointed “scourge of the Aryan race of North America” who summons her to participate in unspeakable defilement and horror, including the murderous “sacrifice” of one of the cult members. She herself, one of many of “Satan’s Children,” is mutilated and infected by an “X” tattoo on her stomach and nearly starved as a prisoner in a cellar before she escapes and betrays the members of the group, who subsequently die in a police shootout and fire.
Drawing resonance from real-life craziness within our culture–the Charles Mansons, the Wacos, the Patty Hearsts, the Hale-Bopp misadventures–“Man Crazy” is a disturbing reminder of the fate that can await vulnerable people like Ingrid. Yet, amazingly, after experiencing all of this, Ingrid survives and mends. At the end of the novel she has been through two years of psychiatric counseling, gone back to school, reconciled with her mother and is about to marry her therapist–another father substitute, no doubt, but one who appears to be reliable, nonjudgmental and loving.
While some parts of this novel make for unpleasant reading, still it is flawlessly written and haunting in its evocation of a damaged young woman who seemingly loses all sense of self-worth as she sinks to the rock bottom of human debasement, only to find within herself the strength to resist and to rebuild her life. That the novel ends with unexpected resilience and promise is perhaps redemption enough for the graphic horrors that precede them. Like so many of Oates’ other works, “Man Crazy” demonstrates a distinctively American faith in the tenacious human spirit, which contrasts sharply with the pervading sense of cultural decline in Drabble’s “The Witch of Exmoor.”
