Reviewed by Mark Dundas Wood
9.7.07

Among a novelist's most useful tools, of course, is the ability to manipulate time—to speed through a decade in a half sentence and then to stretch a few moments into several pages. Understandably, it is often the salient incidents in a character's life (and the author's most important plot points) that comprise such moments: a parent's death, a moment of betrayal or of extraordinary kindness. But this is not always so. Sometimes, as in life, scenes of simple reflection, embracing the quietest of epiphanies, can be the most memorable.

There is such a scene, about four-fifths of the way through Joyce Carol Oates' new novel, The Gravedigger’s Daughter. It is the early 1960s, and the book's protagonist (who calls herself Hazel Jones, though she was born Rebecca Schwart), has spent the night in the grand but desolate upstate home of her new boyfriend's family. That morning, while the boyfriend—Chet Gallagher—sleeps, Hazel/Rebecca prowls through the empty lodge with her restless young son, Zack. She discovers a photo of Chet as a child. Seeing this earlier, youthful incarnation, she has a pang of dismay—a realization that she can never totally know this man, whose soul, she feels, has been largely "squandered, lost."

Zack, meanwhile, has been drawn to (and simultaneously repulsed by) the mounted head of a once-magnificent stag, its "eyes shining with ironic knowledge, but in fact mere glass." The dead animal's hair is "matted and marred" and frosted with cobweb, but "somehow, you believed [the buck] might still be alive."

Oates takes her time here with details: The scene is set with exacting care. She describes the acrid smell of stale smoke in the hallway and the near silence of the morning, disturbed only by the faint sounds of ice melting from the eaves and the cawing of distant crows. Her symbolic link between the frozen image of a younger Chet and the eerie, glass-eyed buck is understated and controlled. The sequence has the distilled power of a finely crafted short story. But it pulls into sharper focus all that Oates has given us in the preceding 450 pages about the life of her determined if much-abused heroine.

Oates might have begun her novel with this finely rendered sequence—have used it as a portal into the life of Hazel/Rebecca. Instead she starts with a scene set on a deserted path alongside Erie Barge Canal in 1959. It is here that Rebecca Schwart finds herself pursued by a peculiar man wearing a Panama hat. On this day, for the first time, Rebecca will encounter the notion of "Hazel Jones."

In the ensuing pages Oates backtracks to tell us, in 250 pages or so—how this gravedigger's daughter wound up on the path beside this canal. Then the author will move forward again, to explain how Rebecca becomes Hazel. The Gravedigger’s Daughter is a novel about becoming other—and about resisting the other, too.

Rebecca Schwart is not quite an immigrant and yet not quite fully American. She is born to German parents on the waves of the Atlantic, en route to the "You-Ess." Her upstate-New York schoolmates taunt her and her brothers with paradoxically mixed chants of "Nazi!" and "Jew!"— although her parents always claim emphatically (too emphatically) that the family belongs to a "very small sect" of German Protestants.

The word "Jew" is one of many never to be spoken in the gravedigger's household. Rebecca learns as a girl that her haunted, troubled father—once a math teacher and an admirer of German philosophers, now a tender of the local cemetery—has grown to equate all words with lies. No wonder that when she wins a dictionary as a prize in a school spelling bee, Jacob Schwart edges toward fury, to the brink of violence. (Later, he will totter and then topple over that brink.)

These early pages chart the emotional stunting of a bright and sensitive child by parents whose own emotional lives were twisted and are eventually annihilated by events in early 20th-century Europe (the personal details of the family's past remain—rightly—murky to the reader throughout). When, much later in the novel, Chet Gallagher courts Hazel, the suitor is reticent. He considers Hazel's soul to be a "shallow" one—an irony, considering that she will come to see Chet's own soul as "squandered" and "lost." But Hazel is, perhaps, merely masquerading, enacting the persona of a good, simple American:

Hazel Jones had established for herself a personality distinct as a comic strip character: Olive Oyl, Jiggs-and-Maggie, Dick Tracy, Brenda Starr Girl Reporter. The deepest truth of the American soul is that it is shallow as a comic strip is shallow….

Whatever its relative depth, Hazel Jones' soul is a sinewy and resilient one. A sense of "keeping-going" serves Rebecca/Hazel through a horrific first marriage—second in terrors, perhaps, only to a single catastrophic day in her early adolescence.

Not that she is an optimist. Once orphaned, she rejects likely sources of solace. She flirts at one time with a desire for Jesus, whom she sees as an austere power: "a beautiful high-scudding cloud." But then an image of crucified rot destroys the dream. Rebecca likewise accepts the aid of two women—first, a lonely church lady and later a concerned neighbor. But she repeatedly shuns any sort of ongoing kindness, remembering her late father's directive: "In animal life the weak are quickly disposed of. So you must hide your weakness, Rebecca." How much less pain had he, rather, instructed her to look for her strength.

She somehow seeks it anyway. Her faith in anything beyond herself may have atrophied, and her ability to trust fully in anyone (besides son Zack) broken beyond repair. But her soul has the unflagging persistence of a migrating bird, separated from the flock but guided by instinct. Or, as Oates' narrator would have it, by a fateful breeze: "the breath of God."

Sometimes one can win in the card game of life, Rebecca/Hazel comes to believe. And nature can sometimes trump nurture (or lack thereof)—but in a good way. Consider the intrepid musical gene that jumps in the novel from parlors of the Old Country to recital halls of America—clinging tightly to the seemingly delicate helix of Beethoven's "Appasionata."

The final, epistolary section of the novel brings the protagonist's migration to a teasing, tantalizing conclusion. Oates keeps the reader guessing about the heroine's fate right up to (and including) the novel's impeccably chosen final sentence. Like one of her long-unacknowledged ancestors, Rebecca has wandered in the desert for some 40 years, managing—finally, briefly—to reunite with a member of her tribe.

Unless the personal oasis she's found is nothing, after all, but a lightly shimmering mirage.