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American Dream of success who will profit from the destruction of the weak.
WONDERLAND (1971)
    Wonderland
covers some of the same historical period as
them
but from a more surreal and openly Gothic perspective. In her Afterword, Oates has called the book “bizarre and obsessive,” a “torrential experience of novel-writing,” and a plunge into the “vortex of being.” Her hero, Jesse Vogel, is the only survivor of his family's massacre by his deranged father; by good fortune, and through the help of various adoptive parents and mentors, he becomes a neurosurgeon who is fascinated by and drawn to the freakish, the grotesque, and the monstrous, although he wishes only to heal.
Wonderland
ends with Jesse's daughter Michelle—Shelly, or “Shell,” as she calls herself—running away with a counterculture guru, Noel. Jesse sets out to rescue her from a commune on Yonge Street in Toronto—an ironically hellish haven for the drugged young.
    As soon as Oates had finished the novel, in 1971, she became unhappy with its ending, in which Jesse takes his emaciated daughter out on a boat in Lake Ontario. “I think it is a very dark, relentless work,and I wonder if you might not be receptive to a modified ending?” she wrote to her editor at Vanguard. As Oates later explained, she “could not end with a small boat drifting out helplessly to sea … it had to end with a gesture of demonic-paternal control” (Afterword to
Wonderland).
In the new ending, Jesse “rescues” Shelley, but of course she is once again forced into the role of the Gothic heroine, dependent on male intervention. As Oates herself observed in the Afterword, “In retrospect, it seems that Shelley Vogel was crying out for a novel of her own, a story that was not a mere appendage of her father's; but this was a novel that I could not, or would not write.”
    In many respects,
Wonderland
was a turning point in Oates's career. As she told
Newsweek
reporter Walter Clemons in December 1972, she decided to “move towards a more articulate moral position,” and to show ways of transcending problems. One way in which she achieved this goal was to allow her female characters novels of their own—to imagine them as autonomous figures, with their own dreams and voices, who could change their lives through will. Another way was to move beyond her poor white characters and take on the experiences and perspectives of another “them”—the black Americans who are observed, feared, and sometimes envied by the white protagonists of the Wonderland Quartet, but who never speak for themselves.
    —
    In every decade and in every novel, Oates has powerfully reinvented herself, but the Wonderland Quartet, written in the “white heat” of youthful imagination and fervor, remains not only relevant but prophetic about the widening social and economic gulf in American society, the self-destructive violence of political extremism, and the terrifying hubris of science and technology. Bringing to life an unforgettable range of men and women, the Wonderland Quartet offers a compelling introduction to a protean and prodigious contemporary artist.
    * Frank McLaughlin, “A Conversation with Joyce Carol Oates,”
Writing!,
September 1985, pp. 21-23.
    * GregJohnson,
Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates
(New York: Dutton, 1998), p. 160.
lbid.

FOR KAY SMITH



1
    I was a child murderer.
    I don't mean child-murderer, though that's an idea. I mean child murderer, that is, a murderer who happens to be a child, or a child who happens to be a murderer. You can take your choice. When Aristotle notes that man is a rational animal one strains forward, cupping his ear, to hear which of those words is emphasized—
rational
animal, rational
animal
? Which am I?
Child
murderer, child
murderer
? It took me years to start writing this memoir, but now that I'm started, now that those ugly words are typed out, I could keep on typing forever. A kind of quiet, blubbering hysteria has