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Title: The Tattooed Girl : A Novel by Joyce Carol Oates ISBN: 0-06-053106-1 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 17 June, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.11 (9 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Brilliantly Plotted Thought Exercise about Hate and Abuse
Comment: If you want to read a book that uses delicate plotting to subtly expose many dimensions of the thinking of its two leading characters, you will find The Tattooed Girl to be a tour de force. Unfortunately, the two characters are people you may not identify with because they seem drawn more to create a hypothetical case (of the sort so fondly debated in laws schools) rather than people you have met or know. As a result, the book's powerful message in favor of connection and sharing falls short its potential punch. The reader is likely to come away glassy-eyed from the book's events, but not redirected in her or his behavior.
Joshua Seigl is a man trying to hide from his own success, and finding it harder and harder to do so. In the course of the book, you'll find out the many reasons why he is hiding. The time comes to take on an assistant to help him with his papers, correspondence and occasional odd jobs around the house. Seigl rejects all kinds of qualified male applicants due to his own hypersensitive nature. Then, one day he meets an odd young woman struggling to do a simple job in a local bookstore. Despite her lack of qualifications other than being non-threatening, he hires her. Her submissiveness allows them to get along on the surface, but she develops a strong dislike for him that emerges into virulent anti-Semitism. Ms. Oates then takes us on a journey with them as they drop their public faces and begin to connect with one another, and the result is that their views of one another begin to reflect the inner realities of one another.
Ms. Oates's theories are that we usually judge one another rather harshly based on appearances, behavior and our historical sense of what's what. Instead, she encourages us to drop our guard and let others know who we really are . . . and take the time to find out who they are. Think of this as being like "Get acquainted with others as you would like others to get acquainted with you" as a variation on the Golden Rule. Although there's an obvious religious message here, Ms. Oates mostly leaves religion out of her story . . . probably to make the potential lesson more accessible to people of all faiths and non-faith.
This book would make a fine choice for a sophomore English class in high school as a launching pad for many fine discussions about the dangers of categorizing others.
As I finished the book, I began to wonder to whom I had not properly explained myself . . . and to whom I had not properly listened. That was a valuable benefit from reading the fine writing in the book.
Rating: 3
Summary: Good, not great
Comment: Others have outlined the plot and characters - so.
One customer/reviewer stated that a good Oates novel is better than the detritus otherwise available. Yes. However, the story might be compared to a film by an important, but aging director: Masterly crafted and with signature moments of brilliance, yet with something missing.
This is not, in my view, a novel about either hatred or anti-Semitism; these appear more as vehicles within a greater story. Yes, the novel involves a Jewish man (one who denies that he is Jewish), his sister, and a gentile woman who is apparantly anti-Semitic.
Yet it isn't enough for a character seething with apparant prejudice to chant over and over (and over) again: "I hate hate hate the Jew." Here is where emotional depth is not established. Moreover, I would go as far as to say that Oates' conception of anti-Semitism - a reality of horrendous scope and importance - is somewhat lazy.
In addition, while I am no East-Coaster, the protagonist, Joshua Seigl, seems convincing as a far older, established man rather than the fading, late-thirties prodigy he is conceived to be.
Meanwhile, the other important character, the barely literate Alma Busch, does not become fully delineated until the novel's final pages, and I do not believe this was by design.
The Tatooed Girl is more centrally a story about fear - fear of failure, or of ridicule - at both ends of the spectrum of success; and of shame - shame for who one is, for what one has done or failed to do.
While there is an electrifying moment of confession, one which is linked to the Holocaust, revealing duplicity and cowardice, the driving force behind The Tatooed Girl is personal alienation, destitution (temporal or spiritual), and the unlikely bond formed between two very different outcasts.
Rating: 5
Summary: Fascinating Probe Into the Emotions of Hatred
Comment: First off, a brief summary of the story: A wealthy heir/author who is rather eccentric decides that he needs an assistant. The author hires a young woman who has been abused and has almost no self-esteem. Her newest boyfriend is a white supremacist who often waits on the eccentric author at a local cafe. He hates the author who found fame by writing about the Holocaust. He then spreads his hatred to his new lover, who is the author's assistant. I'll avoid mentioning the rest of the plot and will not reveal the quirky ending.
The true appeal of this story is the way Oates' enters the mind of her two main characters. The author and his assistant end up sharing a significant portion of their lives together and never connect. Along the way, their relationship is marred by the stain of religious hatred. The hatred is more subtle than the usual anti-Semetic, white supremacist vitriol. Most interestingly, it is captured by Ms. Oates in her examination of their thoughts and emotions.
Some people have criticized Oates for this in the past which seems ludricous because she's written this way for years. You'll get your plot eventually and the story will move on, but only until you experience every change in emotion and confusing thought that comes to the mind of each major character. At times it's unsettling but that's the nature of this story.
In the end, you are likely to be somewhat disturbed by the story and the ending, but if it has made you think about certain truths of life, than it was worth your time to read it.
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Title: Rape : A Love Story by Joyce Carol Oates ISBN: 0786712945 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: 10 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: I'll Take You There : A Novel by Joyce Carol Oates ISBN: 0060501189 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates ISBN: 0812968344 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 22 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Faith of a Writer : Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates ISBN: 0060565535 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 23 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Small Avalanches and Other Stories by Joyce Carol Oates ISBN: 006001217X Publisher: HarperTempest Pub. Date: 18 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.99 |
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