RAPE: A Love Story
by Joyce Carol Oates
Atlantic Books £9.99, 176 pages

In a 1994 essay about serial killers published in The New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates cited, with seeming approval, Edgar Allen Poe’s contention that the “death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world”. The problem with Poe’s “death-intoxicated erotic work”, Oates went on, is that the deceased is invariably imagined “in abstract, melodramatic language so lacking in specificity as to seem hardly more than Poe’s fevered fantasy”. One imagines Poe’s example looming over Oates like an admonitory shadow while she wrote her new novella, Rape: A Love Story, so assiduously attentive to the “specificities” of battery and murder are its descriptions.

Rape, like two of Oates’ previous books, The Tattooed Girl and The Falls, is set in New York State, near Niagara Falls. Like those books, it also grimly adumbrates her longstanding preoccupation with violence and trauma. But, perhaps as a function of its truncated form, Rape lacks both the thematic breadth of The Tattooed Girl, which deals with anti-semitism and class hatred; and the historical scope of The Falls, whose action spans nearly 30 years. It is, instead, a brutal distillation of Oates’ obsessions. Where The Tattooed Girl was, by Oates’ standards at least, expansive, Rape is claustrophobic, hemmed in by its setting and by the impoverished aspirations of its protagonists.

The novella begins in the immediate aftermath of a savage gang-rape in Rocky Point Park in the city of Niagara Falls. Teena Maguire, 35-year-old mother of Bethel (known as “Bethie”), decides to take a late-night short cut through the park with her daughter on their way home from an Independence Day party. They are cornered by a pack of young men, drunk and deranged by crystal meth (a drug that figures prominently in Oates’ depiction of a comparably lumpen milieu in The Tattooed Girl). Teena is multiply raped and left for dead in a filthy boathouse, while Bethie cowers, terrified and injured, behind the stacked hulls of pleasure craft.

As if to unsettle readerly sympathies from the start, Oates filters this account of what happened in Rocky Point Park through the scepticism of Teena’s neighbours, who recall what she was wearing (cut-off shorts and a vest), wonder why she would risk her daughter’s safety in the park after midnight and conclude that “she had it coming”.

A second-person narrative voice, which alternates throughout the book with a more conventional third-person style, tells Bethie that these are some of the things that “would be said of your mother... after she was gang-raped, kicked and beaten and left to die”. And it is in this second-person, occupying Bethie’s point of view, that Oates scrupulously anatomises the assault, most notably in one breathless, page-long paragraph in which the characteristically interrupted rhythms of her prose, inflected by a fiercely controlled lyricism, are refined to a point of rebarbative perfection:

”You could not know how there was a radiant madness in their faces, a glisten to their wolf-eyes, a sheen to their damp teeth.”

The sections told in the third-person are from the point of view of John Dromoor, the rookie cop who discovers Teena in the boathouse. Dromoor is a Gulf War veteran. Many of his colleagues have never fired their service revolvers in the course of duty, but Dromoor takes a sensual pleasure in his gun, enjoying the weight of it on his hip. In this, Dromoor resembles Alma Busch in The Tattooed Girl, whose “thinking followed acts performed by her body”.

And, like Alma, he is marked or branded; not by tattoos but by his time in the Iraqi desert, which has left the “exposed areas of his skin permanently clay-coloured, lizardly.”

While some women are spooked by Dromoor’s appearance, he seems to the wretched, broken Teena to be a saviour. He believes in “justice but not in the judicial instruments of justice”, and when the legal case against Teena’s assailants breaks down, thanks largely to the intervention of a repulsively sleek defence lawyer named Kirkpatrick, Dromoor takes it upon himself to hunt down the defendants.

However, if Oates intends to make a point here about the failure of the legal system to serve the victim in cases of rape, it is, paradoxically, undermined by her obsession with victimhood. Dromoor’s physical afflictions signal to the reader that he, too, is a victim, brutalised by his experiences of combat. But this makes his actions seem less like retribution or vengeance than merely the implacable unfolding of a fate that Dromoor is powerless to shape. As one critic has put it, “identity is destiny” for Oates’ characters. And it’s not clear that this fictional determinism, however bleakly impressive, is any more satisfactory than Poe’s erotic melodrama.