There and Back Again

RESEMBLING NOTHING so much as Little Women gone wild, A Bloodsmoor Romance leads readers on a merry six hundred page chase after five nineteenth century sisters as they gallivant from their ancestral Bloodsmoor Valley to the Broadway stage, the lawless West the spirit world and back again. Written as a parody of a romance, Joyce Carol Oates latest novel excels in the form it spoofs. True to convention a prim but often hyperbolic narrator tells of shocking year undeniably romantic escapades with an unabashed use of italics and the results are hilarious.

Yet dispute our laughter we are drawn into the lives of the Zinn sisters. The reason for the parody remains between the stock descriptions of lovely laces as Oates gives us glimpses into the bitter reality of women's lives before the turn of the century. But she does it without a moment of didacticism making A Bloodsmoor Romance excel equally in simple entertainment.

The Romance covers 20 years in the history of the Zinns of western Pennsylvania. From the abduction of the youngest sister, Deride a "strangely haunted child" to the "final bold stroke of midnight, December 31, 1899." "Although presented as a true chronicle the events tend towards the fantastic from the initial sequence in which Deride disappears in a black silk balloon. Yet such events are treated as commonplace (if confusing) as is sexual mutability. Neither ghost nor devil is long absent from the Zinn hearth.

Although spinning her tale in fantasy the Princeton professor Oates acknowledges her more serious American roots by evoking shades of Melville and Hawthorne. Oates refers obliquely to the former by means of a character named Pip and her narrator openly corrects "Mr. Hawthorne's" idealistic view of a "humorous" tarred and feathered body. But her minute detailed incredibly dense prose has no American models.

With thirteen other novels to her name, Oates has perfected a lush style whose recurring symbols anything from a bottle of orange-flavored medicine to a full figure corset almost escape our conscious notice. A Bloodsmoor Romance, although packed with laughs and adventure cannot be read quickly and its prodigious length barely serves to tie up all the loose ends. Not many apparently light contemporary novels leave the reader feeling so punch drunk.

AT ITS serious core, A Bloodsmoor Romance deals with repression and release. Oates focuses on the restrictions on women's physical natures during the late nineteenth century, epitomized by the corsets which hindered breathing and circulation. In the Bloodsmoor Valley wooing lovers never elude the watchful eyes of chaperones 25 yards away and our narrator lauds Constance Phillippa about to be married because she "was never in that unfortunate state termed nudity" and even bathed lightly attired. Despite the levity inherent in exaggeration the horror comes through in casual accounts of women who have had their lower ribs removed for more fashionable figures and the offhand dismissal of eight or ten miscarriages by a father proud of his four live children.

In such a world the escapes must be extravagant and complete and Oates allows her heroines outlets that would have eluded their real life counterparts. Time travel exists in Bloodsmoor Valley and a magical are protects each sister's life. Reality loses definition and their prissy but a affectionate narrator adds to this illusion as in her loving remembrances she lets facts slip out of chronological order.

We learn one character will never marry chapters before we meet her and only after several hundred pages do we discover alternate versions of several of the family's accepted pasts. Neither time nor sight can be trusted with both ghosts and the mad genius John Quincy Zinn seeking of defy them. Modern science and spiritualism mingle in an atmosphere at once gothic and surreal.

In many ways this book seems to develop Oates last novel, Bellefleur, another family chronicle which mixed the fantastic with the in a romantic setting. The fully realized vision of what was attempted in that novel however presents itself clearly here. In addition to fleshing out more detailed and sympathetic characters, Oates adds authenticity through extensive research and the use of actual period pieces within the text such as The Ladies Wreath (1847). The wedding day Book (1882), and Psychical Research Science and Religion (1925). The almost unimaginable scope of plot and characters contributes as well leaving the reader dazed and satisfied. Humor social commentary and adventure make an odd mixture, but here they combine into something strange and wonderful a Little Women rewritten by a literary descendant of Mary McCarthy and Virginia Woolf.