Sourland

May 24, 2010
Oates's latest collection explores certain favorite Oatesian themes, primary among them violence, loss, and privilege. Three of the stories feature white, upper-class, educated widows whose sheltered married lives have left them unprepared for life alone. In "Pumpkin-Head" and "Sourland," the widows—Hadley in the first story, Sophie in the second—encounter a class of Oatesian male: predatory, needy lurkers just out of prosperity's reach. In the first story, our lurker is Anton Kruppe, a Central European immigrant and vague acquaintance of Hadley whose frustrations boil over in a disastrous way. In the second story, Sophie is contacted by Jeremiah, an old friend of her late husband, and eventually visits him in middle-of-nowhere northern Minnesota, where she discovers, too late, his true intentions. The third widow story, "Probate," concerns Adrienne Myer's surreal visit to the courthouse to register her late husband's will, but Oates has other plans for Adrienne, who is soon lost in a warped bureaucratic funhouse worthy of Kafka. Oates's fiction has the curious, morbid draw of a flaming car wreck. It's a testament to Oates's talent that she can nearly always force the reader to look.

The 16 short stories in SOURLAND manage to fascinate and repel at the same time. Coleen Marlo masterfully tackles the works' challenges, painting vivid portraits of loss, gothic extremes, and violence with the range these diverse tales require. She employs subtle shifts of emphasis while maintaining clear storytelling personas. Individual characters come to life as Oates weaves magical situations with clever analogies, sensual observations, sexual tumult, and her signature depictions of perversions and gory details. Marlo imbues even the many secondary characters with strong variations. We hear in her voice awed and baffled children, sad adults, frightened and resigned victims, harsh criminals, and all of their innocence, despair, tension, and anger. Her vocal urgency, tempered often by tragic whimsy, scales the heights of mounting violence, then descends into the depths of sorrow. A.W. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine