You can’t help feeling you’ve read this before

Carthage

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

ISBN-13: 978-0007485741

Publisher: 4th Estate

Guideline Price: Sterling14.99

Girl gone missing . . . I can’t be sure, having read only a modest portion of her gigantic oeuvre of at least 140 books, that Joyce Carol Oates hasn’t written about such a girl before, but she probably has. The missing girl sits comfortably as a character among the murdered and raped and abused ones who so often figure in her work.

Here she’s called Cressida Mayfield. Daughter of Zeno and Arlette Mayfield, sister of Juliet, prosperous and respected citizens of Carthage, in upstate New York.

One summer morning Arlette wakes in the early hours filled with dread. She finds Cressida’s bed hasn’t been slept in. Very soon it’s plain that something terrible has happened. Cressida, who never goes to bars, was last seen in the dubious Roebuck taproom out by the lake. In the company of Cpl Brett Kincaid, casualty of the Iraq war and former fiance of her sister, Juliet.

Hanging out in a bar with the losers of the town is uncharacteristic of Cressida Mayfield. She’s one of those weird kids who regularly appear in Oates’s stories. Childish for her age – 19 – moody and too smart for her own good, unchummy, thin and monkeyish with her dark eyes and black frizzy hair, she’s the opposite of the beautiful and fair, all-American Juliet. Her family has always found her a little difficult, a little fierce. But, liberal and well meaning, they appreciate her intelligence and artistic talent.

The horror of Cressida's disappearance is deepened by Kincaid's implication in it. He's found that same morning drunk and incoherent in his Jeep, which Cressida was seen getting into the night before, parked up in the preserve by the river. Blood and hair that may be hers are also found in the car. That he murdered her and threw her body in the river seems plain.

War wounds
How could Brett have done this to the Mayfields? His own father absent, his mother not an easy person, they were family to him. Arlette loved him as her own son. Zeno was exasperated by his signing up for Iraq – "Virtually no political leaders' sons and daughters enlisted . . . No college-educated young people . . . The war would be fought by an American underclass . . .". And then coming home a mess, damaged in mind and body. But if Juliet loved Brett, so would Zeno.

In due course, after Zeno has almost given himself a heart attack searching the preserve for his missing daughter, Brett confesses to the killing and is sentenced to 20 years. How could he, sweet harmless boy, have done such a thing? The family’s happiness is ruptured. Arlette drifts away into the solace of faith and good works, Juliet into silence, and Zeno into rage and denial.

How could he? The answer seems to lie in Iraq and an act of sadism that Brett saw, perhaps even took part in: the gruesome rape and mutilation of a girl and the murder of her family. This, and the nightmare Brett lives in since, make Carthage a polemic against war, specifically the "crusade against terror", as much as an exploration of an all-American family. As such it is effective, if inevitably a little hackneyed.

Written in the staccato style of an unusually descriptive book of evidence, thus ends the first section. In the second we move to Florida. An “investigator” and his “intern” are touring a prison in the guise of interested citizens. The investigator is a professorial-looking writer of bestselling exposés of American scandals, the intern an introverted, boyish young woman. One is as secretive as the other about their personal identities.

The tour presents an obvious opportunity for a polemic about the callousness of the prison system and, especially, the barbarism of capital punishment. Here the novel tends to read like very descriptive journalism – and that’s not meant as a criticism.

The thousands of inmates, brutish with rage before they’re cowed into submission. The lasciviousness of the tour guide’s contempt for his charges. The pathos of the last supper, the last meal of their lives for those on death row, which they can choose but the cost of which must not exceed $40. No caviar and champagne for them. Mostly they choose the kid’s junk food they were reared on: burgers and fries and chocolate milkshakes.

Vivid as they are, however, the polemical aspects of Carthage are an aside. Partly because the author is too inclined to see both sides of the argument to sustain unmitigated indignation. And because she is ultimately more interested in her perennial themes, the themes she explores over and over again like someone obsessively playing the same CD. How love does or doesn't survive. How endemic American violence fractures American family bonds. Jealousy between siblings. The construction – or finding? – of identity. Guilt and shame and the need to find redemption.

These are not small themes or small concerns. And Oates creates vivid characters with which to explore them. They’re types, certainly, Cressida and the Mayfields, but they’re also individuals. Not one of her characters wants for vitality.

Yet the pervading impression is of deja vu. You wouldn’t have to read much of Joyce Carol Oates to feel you’ve read this book and met these people before. Nor to be irritated by the Oates tics, the explications and repetitions and parentheses and italics. She has made a genre of her own, like Barbara Cartland – or, to be fairer, perhaps like Dickens.

And it is good enough to raise a question: if one of her peers wrote this book as a stand-alone, might we be more ready to be impressed? As well as a bolder question: should writers be rationed in their output? Thirty books in a lifetime? Fifty?