MY HEART LAID BARE
By Joyce Carol Oates
Dutton, 531 pages, $26.95
Joyce Carol Oates is a writer of such prodigious productivity that it is a challenge for readers–and publishers–to keep up. The Joyce Carol Oates Web site at http://www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/southerr/jco.html lists five titles awaiting publication. By my count, already published are 27 novels, 4 novellas, 6 pseudonymous novels by Rosamond Smith, 24 short-story collections, 8 collections of essays, 8 poetry collections and 6 collections of plays. Added to these volumes are hundreds of uncollected works published in periodicals. Moreover, there exists a “sizable pile” of unpublished novels written over the course of her career that are not yet planned for publication, according to her biogra-pher, Greg Johnson (“Invisible Writer,” Dutton, $34.95).
In fact, Johnson documents that her newest book, “My Heart Laid Bare,” was completed in 1984. This novel is part of Oates’ boldly experimental, multivolume study of American life in the decades before and after the turn of the century. Others in this series are the brilliantly inventive family saga “Bellefleur” (1980), the parodic, covertly feminist domestic romance “A Bloodsmoor Romance” (1982), the vertiginous detective thriller “Mysteries of Winterthurn” (1984) and what Oates describes as a “Gothic horror set in turn-of-the-century Princeton,” “The Crosswicks Horror,” written in 1981 and as yet unpublished.
In each of these books, Oates reimagines Gothicized 19th Cen-tury genres from a skeptical, tongue-in-cheek, postmodern perspective. Intermingling the plausible and the implausible, the historical and the imagined, the real and the surreal, these books are, Oates says, part of an “immense design” with a kind of “dream-unity” extending from the birth of Germaine in “Bellefleur” to the death of Abraham Licht in “My Heart Laid Bare.” Together they form a complex parable about American history, aspiration and character.
Capacious, sweeping, picaresque, “My Heart Laid Bare” is richly imagined, although it does not duplicate the mesmerizing magical realism and multi-generational and ontological complexity of “Bellefleur.” Abraham Licht and his family rise out of the Muirkirk swamp just as the Bellefleurs, through ruthless, willful acquisition and exploitation, establish their corrupt foothold within the pristine wilderness of upstate New York.
In this novel, Oates draws inspiration from Melville’s “The Confidence Man,” Thomas Mann’s “The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man” and Twain’s King and Duke of “Huckleberry Finn” in creating the Lichts, a family of tricksters dedicated to deception, disguise and duping who prey on gullibility and greed. Descendants of Sarah Licht, who masqueraded as nobility and was convicted of theft in London in 1771 and censured to indentured servitude in America, they, too, reinvent themselves in myriad disguises and stage a dizzying number of con games, fixed races, fake robberies, investment scams, patent-medicine frauds, opportunistic romances and hasty retreats. They infiltrate the highest reaches of New York and Philadelphia society and Washington politics, cavorting with historical personages such as the Astors and President Warren Harding before the patriarch, Abraham, dies an ignominious death in the Muirkirk swamp, a fate similar to Sarah’s.
“No man dare” write a book titled ” `My Heart Laid Bare,’ ” said Edgar Allan Poe (as quoted in the novel’s epigraph), yet Abraham Licht aspires to do just that. A kind of self-appointed Antichrist who, lest we miss the point, sets up residence in an abandoned church at the edge of the swamp, he teaches his children his catechism of inverted Christian values, including: “All men are our enemies. . . . No success without another’s failure. No failure without another’s success. To feel another’s pain is defeat. To turn the other cheek, a betrayal.”
He is dedicated to “The Game” of ingenious and cunning opportunism, and to his children, “for wasn’t the baby a form of Abraham Licht’s very self, reentering the world, like an act of Hindu reincarnation, to conquer the world again? and yet again?” yet one after another is lost or disappoints, and he callously seeks to replace them as easily as he changes his appearance. He goes through several wives and children, including an adoptive black foundling, Elisha, his soulmate. Elisha falls in love with Millicent, one of Abraham’s daughters and a supremely self-serving practitioner of “The Game.” Exposed, Millicent aligns herself with her father’s heartless dismissal of Elisha. Later, this “brother” emerges as an Afrocentric revolutionary, preaching separatism and hatred. Here the broadly representational quality of this parable about American society is especially evident.
Exuberant in its narrative energy, chock full of vividly realized episodes, the novel is a good read–although admittedly, sometimes its contrivance and two-dimensional charlatans fail to compel. Nonetheless, “My Heart Laid Bare,” complex and complete in itself, is enriched by its placement within a set of experimental novels representing the most ambitious and fecund period in this important writer’s development.
