I'll Take You There, by Joyce Carol Oates, Harper Collins, 2002, 209 pages.
Writer Joyce Carol Oates is without doubt one of the most famous people ever to have come from this area. And though she claims Lockport as her hometown, I went to Williamsville High School with her. She was editor of our yearbook. Everyone knew even back then that she was slated to be a writer. So for years I have read her work, looking for people and places I would recognize. And they are always there, especially in "Broke Heart Blues," which was about Williamsville and a high school reunion, something I've never seen Joyce attend.
Oates' latest novel, "I'll take You There," is somewhat autobiographical. The narrator grew up in Strykersville, N.Y., which Oates transplants to Niagara County, not far from Lake Ontario, in the "Snow Belt." It is the early '60s and our heroine (she doesn't have a real name) is attending Syracuse University on scholarship. Her mother died when she was a baby and her father is always away. Mary Alice, as the housemother of her sorority calls her, is an excellent student and writer, much like Oates, who also went to Syracuse. Both have work published while they are still in college. Both are from rural backgrounds. But Mary Alice is one obsessive character.
The novel can easily be broken into three parts. The first part has to do with Mary Alice joining a sorority. She is amazed that her sisters would want her, as she lacks the proper clothes and money, even the proper smile. However they take her in, because it is thought that she will improve their cumulative grade-point average by helping them write papers. Mary Alice finds her sisters to be nothing more than fluffheads happy to squeeze by with C's. It takes little time for her to realize that she is completely out of place in Kappa Gamma Phi, but how to get out? She can't afford the sorority and has to work extra jobs, causing her to miss meetings, for which she is fined. She is so upset that she can't sleep in her assigned room or eat with her sisters. She takes to sleeping on a couch in a basement study-room and pilfering food from a day-old bakery dump. Finally she comes up with a solution. She tells them that she is one quarter Jewish, and that does the trick.
The second section has to do with our heroine's obsession with a man. Now calling herself Anellia, she falls in love with a voice from the back of an ethics class. The voice belongs to a much older black graduate student by the name of Vernor Matheius. Mind you, this is the early '60s, the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement. The dean of students even calls her in to chastise her for the relationship, but our Anellia is completely infatuated.
She stalks Matheius, following him around the campus, and a relationship occurs which ends abruptly when she realizes she knows nothing about him and that he has a wife and children left behind somewhere.
The third section has to do with our heroine's dying father, whom she had believed to be dead anyway, and her trip in an old Volkswagen from Syracuse to Utah to see him. Again she is obsessed with the task at hand.
All this may seem depressing, and at times it is. It is also very humorous, especially the section about the sorority. Somehow, though, as these obsessions progress, they become more compelling and the reader is drawn into what is happening. And, most of all, the novel is beautifully written. It ends at her parents' graves right here in Niagara County:
"I wouldn't be joining them in that rocky soil, but my family was now complete. If things work out between us, someday I'll take you there."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | November 19 2002 |