Fiction: It begins in a tone of suppressed hysteria, a heightened recollection of every pain, every hurt as absorbed and narrated by a clever, unattractive, working class girl desperate for friends, desperate to belong. This is the 30th novel, and close on 100th book, from a US writer who has produced even more words, more books, than John Updike - and has paid for it, in a way, writes Eileen Battersby.
Joyce Carol Oates is a literary industry. More importantly, she is seldom an easy read, and is often capable of making an immense emotional demand on her reader. She writes fiction at its most intense.
At times, this can prove oppressive, and the early pages of this terrifying new novel are almost too shockingly candid to comprehend without physically gagging, such is the relentless squalor of the narrator's life and the near perverse pleasure she seems to take in remembering it all, particularly the college sequences.
This narrator, more believable than sympathetic, is looking back on her early life with the razor-sharp clarity of clear glass. Her younger self proves a recognisable Oates persona; a dauntingly articulate loner living on ideas and dreams while feeding off personal and sexual humiliation. She is highly intelligent; a scholarship girl who has escaped her unloving small-town family. Now a university student studying philosophy at Syracuse, she is engaged in analysing her private dilemma with a brutal clarity worthy of the lives of the saints.
As the novel opens, she recalls her obsession with joining the college sorority. To her, all hope, all promise is epitomised by the formidable sorority residence, the Kappa Gamma Pi house. "You could argue that it was the most dour, possibly even the ugliest of the houses, but to me, such qualities suggested aristocratic hauteur, authority. To live in such a mansion and to be an intimate, a sister of Kappa Gamma Pi, would be, I knew, to be transformed." More than existence itself, she wants to be a member of what appears to be a brutally unforgiving bevy of spoilt young women who dress well, party furiously and aim for marriage at 21. She wants to live among them, yet not only appears to be a misfit, but also willingly behaves as one.
We are never told her real name, she goes by an invented tag, that of "Anellia". In a world of 1960s US glamour, she is poor, scavenges out of campus trash cans and is obviously on the edge of a breakdown. Gradually, her story emerges: she is the daughter of Ida, a mother who died too early for the narrator to remember her. The narrator lives with that guilt of possibly causing her mother's death. She never knew her, but her three unloving brothers all much older than she knew Ida and use this knowledge to keep their sister at a distance. Her father, the son of German immigrants, was never more than a crude stranger who was seldom at home.
The urgency of the narrative is frequently overpowering, should we feel sorry for Anellia or simply avoid her. Oates is a serious, precise writer, and is often inspired; her prose is angry, vivid, forensic and alert to every nuance of sensation. Her linguistic powers are remarkable; there is no doubting her command of language, her instinct and the almost hypnotic way she draws the reader into an underworld of female emotional torment.
Oates shares the profundity, the pain, the sense of America common to the major US writers, only the humour is absent. Almost alone of the major US writers and indeed of most US novelists, she, like Norman Mailer, has no comic touch. There are no one-liners, no easy asides. Yet, while she does not engage, she does compel. She places female experience under a powerful microscope and dissects it, without resorting to the polemic of a Marilyn French or Marge Piercy. For all the intelligence, her fiction never becomes an intellectual exercise - her sense of outrage is too acute. At her finest - as in Marya: A Life (1986), You Must Remember This (1987), I Lock The Door Upon Myself (1990), Black Water (1992) and even in the florid but dazzling lament Broke Heart Blues (1999) - she truly ranks among the best of the combined North Americans.
Life in the sorority house has none of the romance and all of the nightmare of a fairytale. The narrator is quickly reduced to the type of fawning servant girl, sufficiently pathetic to take the blame for any insult hurled at Mrs Thayer, the appalling house-mother, a snobbish English woman who is out of her depth.
"Of the Kappas," recalls Anellia, "I was the only girl who wore the same clothes day after day. A rumpled charcoal-gray wool skirt with a waistband so loose, the skirt twisted around, side to front, back to front, without my noticing. A long-sleeved white cotton blouse, much laundered and insufficiently ironed, with pert button-down collar in the style of the day. And an oversized navy blue orlon V-neck sweater . . . my socks were mismatched but both were white wool. My hair lifted in uncomfortable clots of frizz, like iron filings stirred by a passing magnet . . . I represented a valiant if somewhat smudged variant of the collegiate ideal."
Oates allows her narrator to chronicle intently her endless self-inflicted humiliations. Finally, a series of misadventures causes her to accept banishment from the expensive and ruthless sorority. It also ensures her survival at the university and leaves her free for her next mistake - a disastrous love affair.
If the idea of a poor girl of German immigrant stock, hampered by her poverty and cringingly low self esteem, falling for an arrogant black post-graduate student in 1960s New York state seems too clichéd to justify persevering with Oates - reconsider.
The characterisation of the angry Vernor is well handled. His self-loathing is more than a match for the contempt the narrator directs at herself.
It is the ferocity of this self-hatred that sets Oates apart from Margaret Atwood, with whom she has much in common - except Atwood's laconic humour always tempers her barbed intelligence. The narrator's pursuit of Vernor presents her at her most touching and determined - but then Anellia possesses an almost surreal determination.
Acted out in three parts, each concerned with a specific subject, the third sequence tells the story of her father's dying. The narrator's fascination with the surreal appearance of her father's friend, "the hunch-over little doll-woman" Hildie, is typical of the heightened descriptive writing at which Oates excels: "She was a sturdy little troll of a woman, in her rayon-white costume; she might've been as young as 30, or as old as 50; she had short muscled legs and thick ankles, strong shoulders and forearms; a clearly defined, shapely bust that strained at the rayon shirt; her hair so bizarrely dyed, crow-black and lustreless, and her painted doll's face." Attempting to see her father's ruined face, a privilege Hildie denies, insisting the narrator keep her eyes closed, becomes a test more expected in a fairytale. I'll Take You There showcases the sheer power and angry energy, the outraged sensitivity, of Oates's writing. It is also an effective, honest title; Oates through her narrator fulfils the promise, she does take her reader, or the narrator's unnamed listener, to this place called the past and the self that survived it.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
I'll Take You There. By Joyce Carol Oates. 4th Estate, 290 pp. £10.99