{"id":3123,"date":"2012-11-13T06:49:13","date_gmt":"2012-11-13T06:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=3123"},"modified":"2012-11-14T07:25:06","modified_gmt":"2012-11-14T07:25:06","slug":"the-corn-maiden-and-other-nightmares-by-joyce-carol-oates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=3123","title":{"rendered":"The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates"},"content":{"rendered":"

Published by Head of Zeus\u00a08 November 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

384 pp, hardcover, \u00a316.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Catherine Jones<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2018Mommy would take care of her but Marissa knew from reading stories that this could not be so. You had only to turn the page, something would happen.\u2019<\/p>\n

In\u2019 The Corn Maiden\u2019, the title story in this seven-piece collection from Joyce Carol Oates, 11-year-old Marissa Bantry disappears from affluent Skatshill-on-Hudson. With silky blonde hair to her shoulders, Marissa had \u2018very little sense of herself and how others regarded her\u2019 and had become a target for the pressing spite of her peers. \u2018Already in fifth grade it had begun, a perplexing girl-meanness.\u2019<\/p>\n

When Leah, her mother, returns late to the silent apartment they share, the truth dawns that her vulnerable daughter \u2013 the product of a long-gone relationship with a medical student – is missing. A bright drop-out, Leah is \u2018aware of herself as one might see oneself on a video monitor behaving with conspicuous normality though the circumstances have shifted, and are not normal\u2019 as she realizes her life must be exposed to the jumping greed of the media.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u2018The man in the 7-Eleven would learn she was a single mother, not married. And that the numerous six-packs of Coors she bought had not been for a husband but for her.\u2019 (\u2018Dial 911 your life is no longer your own\u2019)<\/p>\n

And so unfolds a tale of hunger and malice, naivety and horror, in a narrative peopled by loners. Oates, author of more than 70 works, winner of the National Book Award, and twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote this selection of stories about life souring, unloved children, and sudden death over a 15-year-period. In \u2018The Corn Maiden\u2019, which forms around one third of the book, she excels at depicting the frailty and power of the outsider.<\/p>\n

On the periphery of Marissa\u2019s life has been teenager Jude Trahern, the lone grandchild of a wealthy legal family, who lives with her distant, half-blind \u2018nagnagnagging\u2019 grandmother on a vast estate.<\/p>\n

In encounters with Jude, lone wolf computer teacher Mikal Zallman saw \u2018a guarded rodent look, furtive, anxious, somehow appealing\u2019 but he dismisses her. He is not crazy; he knows how to behave with pupils, and keeps himself to himself. Hours before he is brought in by the police as a suspect in Marissa\u2019s disappearance, he has been driving along the Hudson \u2018where the river landscape so mesmerizes the eye, you wonder why you\u2019d ever given a damn for all that\u2019s petty, inconsequential\u2019.<\/p>\n

The horror gathers pace along with the frenzied activity prompted by missing children.\u00a0 \u2018Like a sudden bloom of daffodils there appeared overnight, everywhere in Skatskill, the smiling likeness of MARISSA BANTRY 11.\u2019<\/p>\n

Leah foresees herself \u2018performing clumsily and stumbling over her lines in the genre missing child\/pleading mother<\/em>\u2019. Though distraught, she acknowledges the irony that in the tabloids, the photos of the missing girl, mother, and suspect are printed side by side \u2013 \u2018a mock family\u2019.<\/p>\n

Broken families abound in this collection. In \u2018Beersheba\u2019, a distant step-father receives a phone call that takes him in an upscale Toyota to a place where \u2018cold rose from the earth like departing spirits\u2019. Nine-year-old Jessica in \u2018Nobody Knows My Name\u2019 has the bitter precocity to realize \u2018you must tell adults only what they want you to tell them so they will love you\u2019.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t expecting to enjoy this so much. Oates\u2019s sharp prose brings a subtle menace and truth to the kind of situations exploited on true crime channels. My inclination was to read at a pace but I frequently stopped to admire and absorb.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Catherine Jones<\/p>\n

So unfolds a tale of hunger and malice, naivety and horror, in a narrative peopled by loners. Oates, author of more than 70 works, winner of the National Book Award, and twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote this selection of stories about life souring, unloved children, and sudden death over a 15-year-period. In \u2018The Corn Maiden\u2019, which forms around one third of the book, she excels at depicting the frailty and power of the outsider.[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3123"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3173,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3123\/revisions\/3173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}