Power Vacuum

By Martha Duffy

DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL

by JOYCE CAROL OATES

561 pages. Vanguard. $7.95.

In replying last year to a critic who accused her of writing too fast, Joyce Carol Oates said, "If I could live long enough, I would like to write novels touching upon and including every person who lives in the United States." With each new publication comes evidence that the lady meant exactly what she said. Her two most recent books have been about professions as well as people. Significantly, they are professions that are deeply revered and mistrusted for their power over life. Last year's Wonderland was about doctors--an old medical megalomaniac and his foster son. The new novel, her sixth, concerns lawyers. Marvin Howe is a Nietzschean criminal lawyer--vainglorious, corrupt, wondrously successful, obsessed with his control over people. His opposite number is less obviously a monster. Jack Morrissey defends social outcasts and agitators, the teeming poor of Detroit. He lives simply, but is just as bewitched by power as Howe.

Both men seem promising material for the kind of long, naturalistic novel Oates writes. But two major drawbacks make this one of her weakest books to date. The first is that writing about institutions like the law in fiction requires a special knack. Oates doesn't have it. She gets tangled in the threats and promises of litigation, the paradoxes of legality and morality. The second difficulty is less understandable in so experienced a writer. The two lawyers, as well as the rest of the people in this dense work, are seen in relation to Elena Ross, one of the most boring women imaginable. Elena marries Howe and later takes Morrissey as a lover. Kidnaped and brutalized by her divorced father as a child, she is emotionally inert. As a woman she seems less unhappy than confused. Her customary response to a direct question is "I don't know." Needless to say, she is enigmatically beautiful.

Oates' point seems to be that both supermen are bested by this apparent power vacuum. Howe cannot stop her from walking out on him--without alimony but picking up the $100 bills he flings after her. This climactic scene echoes Nora's liberation in A Doll's House. Elena comes as close as she ever does to coherent motivation. She is leaving, she says, because "I would be careless of my life if I stayed here ... I might make someone hurt me."

Oates is seldom mentioned in the list of activist women writers, but one of her favorite themes is how women fall apart through marriage and dependence on a man. Some are destroyed, like Dr. Pedersen's alcoholic wife in Wonderland. Others--like Loretta in them--survive and grow tougher. Elena leaves her furniture and furs to take responsiblity for her own life. But on the book's last page she fecklessly returns to Morrissey, just as he seems to have got clear of their disastrous affair and adjusted himself to his marriage. Is she a temptress, a wanton driven by forces she cannot control? Or does her resolve to lead her own life mean that she will finally not harm Morrissey? The depressing thing is that the preceding 561 pages--filled with incident, example, internal monologue, psychological speculation--do not furnish a clue.

--Martha Duffy

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