Antimacassar

By Patricia Blake

A BLOODSMOOR ROMANCE

by Joyce Carol Oates

Dutton; 615 pages; $16.95

"Human kind cannot bear very much reality," T.S. Eliot observed. Evidently, neither can many prominent novelists. An increasing number are now in flight from the everyday world they used to chronicle. In his latest novel, God's Grace, Bernard Malamud conceived of a latter-day Noah, adrift on an ark. Doris Lessing has taken an apparently irreversible leap into outer space with her multivolume chronicle of "galactic empires." Now Joyce Carol Oates has again wandered off into the never-never land of the neo-gothic romance. In Oates' case, the purpose of the excursion is parody. A Bloodsmoor Romance, like the author's 1980 Bellefleur, is intended to poke fun at gushy Victorian women novelists and such latter-day descendants as Barbara Cartland, Victoria Holt and Rosemary Rogers.

A 615-page parody? Yes indeed, for Oates needs the space, as she explains: "Alas, how shall we describe the trajectory of Romance? How shall we, obliged to toil in mere words, seek to illume the fleet, fluttering, gossamer sensations, elusive as the hummingbird, that course along the veins, and swell the captive heart, of the credulous?"

It is in this empurpled mode, relentlessly maintained throughout the novel (her 14th), that Oates has undertaken to recount the saga of the five nubile Zinn sisters of Bloodsmoor Valley, Pa., circa 1880. For these young ladies, the trajectory of love follows the customarily lunatic lines of an Oates romance. The youngest Zinn, Deirdre, is snatched away by a stranger in "an outlaw balloon of sinister black-silken hue" as she sits crocheting in a gazebo. Sister Malvinia escapes the toils of Victorian family life in her own way: she makes a career as an actress and is courted by a singularly repulsive Mark Twain. Octavia marries a closet sadist and feather-boa fetishist. Constance Philippa runs away on her wedding night, leaving in her bed a dressmaker's dummy with which her unknowing husband consummates the marriage. Fleeing west, Constance disguises herself so persuasively as the brave and manly Philippe Fox that she is appointed Assistant Deputy to the United States Marshal for Southeast Arizona, and inexplicably becomes a 'member of the masculine gender, complete in all physiological requirements as to genitalia."

Readers who hope to find Oates' usual steamy sex scenes will have to get through some 380 pages of prissiness before reaching one, unless the defloration of the dressmaker's dummy can be reckoned as steamy. Octavia's lovemaking with her fetishist, involving half a dozen or more petticoats and "fifty or sixty or even seventy yards of trimming" (including the boa) is rewardingly comical. Still, Oates' mock-Victorian diction has imposed its own restraints, as exemplified by such pronouncements as: "I am heartsick that there may well be those persons of the masculine gender, who, lacking an intrinsic purity of character, may, by laborious effort, and much unseemly exercise of the lower ranges of the imagination, summon forth a prurient gratification, from these hapless pages!"

When her comic invention flags, Oates offers the fruit of research into the mores of the late 19th century middle classes in America. Her novel is dense with such tiresome detail as the Zinn family's favorite books (Blanche of the Brandywine and Polly Peablossom's Wedding), songs (What Is Home Without a Mother?) and underarm deodorant (chloride of lime and powdered salicylic acid). Oates' heroines quote liberally from the world's worst verse, culled by the author from such works as The Ladies' Wreath, a Magazine Devoted to Literature, Industry and Religion. But what the women in A Bloodsmoor Romance seem to do most is knit, embroider and crochet. So assiduous is one character that she produces an antimacassar "somewhat above the conventional in length, being 1,358 yards, or some three-quarters of a mile .. ."--the perfect symbol for the futility and tedium of Oates' novel. --By Patricia Blake

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