Customer Reviews

The Tattooed Girl: A Novel (Oates, Joyce Carol)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

After September 11, 2001 many authors felt it necessary to respond in some way. But how? Joyce Carol Oates has chosen to write a novel, not about that historical event specifically, but about the nature of hate and evil. She chooses to concentrate this exploration in the intimate environment of a celebrated, reclusive writer named Joshua Seigl. He has reached a point in his life where he realises that he can no longer block the world out and needs human company. Searching for an assistant to help him organize his enormous body of work and attend to the menial chores of his large house, he encounters a drifter who calls herself Alma. Her body is covered in what may be scars, birthmarks or tattoos. Alma uses these mysterious marks on her body to fashion a personality for herself which can confront the uglier aspects of the world that her more sensitive self cannot combat. After hiring her there follows a working relationship in the intimate space of Seigl's house that unearths hidden aspects of both their identities. The unspoken antithesis that exists between them is built through months of a seemingly harmonious working relationship. Yet the hatred that exists between them is brought physically to the forefront by the exaggerated attitudes of Alma's dangerous, anti-Semitic lover Dmitri and Seigl's mentally unbalanced, passionately upper class sister Jet. Inevitably, the central characters own prejudices must come to the forefront where a tacit understanding is formed amidst tragic events.

The ultimate question this novel raises is: what place does art have in illuminating the past and dispensing with hatred? The answer is not as simple as it appears because fiction does not deal in truth. One can't help feeling that Oates herself is attempting to work out her own feelings over the matter in a heated argument toward the end of the novel where Joshua defends his writing:

"`Alma, I think of myself as writing stories for others. In place of others who are dead, or mute. Who can't speak for themselves.'"

This argument for the exhumation of buried events and people is the same that Oates has used in interviews to explain why she has written some novels such as Black Water and Blonde that reinvent historical situations. Alma's rebuttal is that he pretends to know these things, but doesn't actually know. However, one could argue that the point of fictional writing isn't to get at the "truth" but to convey an "idea" and in these "ideas" we discover the reality that has been hidden. The Tattooed Girl isn't a political novel in any obvious allegorical manner. It does, however, haunt your thoughts in the way it illuminates the divisions (economical, social, racial and religious) between people to such a startlingly intense degree. It is an incredibly important book that ought to be read now.

I have read all of Joyce Carol Oates's short-story collections and hadn't given one of her novels a whirl until now. The Tattooed Girl confirms my belief that Oates is one of the best writers of our time. The Tattooed Girl tells the story of a late-thirties Jewish writer and the strange girl he hires to be his assistant. He is taken by her gaunt, heavily tattooed appearance and lack of self-esteem. As he writes a historical novel based on his grandparents' struggles during the Holocaust, he is unaware of the anti-Semitic things that occur right from under his nose, things that are brought on by his assistant's racist boyfriend. There are various disturbing twists throughout the novel.

I couldn't put this book down. The writing is so beautiful and full of prose that it kept me turning the pages. The story is something I'd come to expect from Oates. Some of the dark and disarming passages would make excellent book discussions. This isn't just a story about hate, it is also a story centered on the layers of the characters' personalities and the inner workings of the soul. Oates delves once again on domestic abuse here, but she always adds a whole unique perspective to the aforementioned subject matter. I love how the author compared the things that go on in Seigl's novel with the things that occur to him in the real world. Some of those scenes moved me. Once again, Joyce Carol Oates has illustrated the reason why I love her writing so much. She is a true and rare talent and I look forward to reading all of her novels.

To say that JC Oates's THE TATTOOED GIRL is populated with flawed souls and monumentally flawed people is to understate the case. The two main characters, old-money wealthy and educated Joshua Seigl and Alma Busch (the tattooed girl of the title) are at the end their respective ropes: Seigl, a JD Salinger-type recluse living off the reputation of his first novel which deals with the survivors of the Holocaust, who can't quite bring himself to complete any of his many works in progress and Alma, a wanton, perpetually down-on-her-luck young woman who carries the marks of her past and of her lifestyle on her face and body.
THE TATTOOED GIRL is not by any means one of Oates's strongest recent works but it certainly has it's moments and patented Oatesian scenes such as this one dealing with food and eating: "Her rapidly chewing mouth...Saliva glistened in the corners..." It has always been interesting to me that Oates, thin and trim in real life, has always written of food and eating in such a manner: uncontrolled, sensually even orgasmically. And she does it here once again.
Seigl and Alma reach out for each other but not at the same time. In fact one of the weakest character motivations of this novel has to do with Anna's hate of Seigl because he is Jewish (which technically, he isn't having been born to a gentile mother) and her perceived notion that he thinks himself privileged: "Mostly that's why she hated him... he didn't know what he owned."
Throughout most of the novel Seigl is completely unaware of Alma's real feelings about him and Alma likewise of Seigl's towards her. The connection is not made until the last few pages when it is too late for both of them to revel in the kind feelings, love and ultimately the redemption of their love for each other.
THE TATTOOED GIRL is Oates at her very darkest. And even though the writing is often glorious and redolent with the aroma of truth, this is not Oates at her best: some of the characters are sketchy and could have been left out and some are retreads of characters from earlier novels, especially Alma. (Alma could be exchanged with Ingrid in MAN CRAZY or Anellia in I'LL TAKE YOU THERE. They are one and the same.)
But a good Oates novel is better than most authors best and anyone interested in contemporary fiction would be hard pressed to find better, more aggressive writing of this quality anywhere else.

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.

After falling in love and pain with We were the Mulvaneys I had to read another one of Oates' books. The bookcover drew me in, the title and the description on the flap.

The characters are soo well thought out that you feel as if you can really see this happening. You feel sad for the tattooed girl, the lonely bachelor losing his independence and the wacky sister who turns out to be the craziest one of them all.

A touching story, this one takes you into the darkness...

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.

The title drew me in. I confess, I am affected and apt to buy a book by a provocative
title and/or cover. I thought it would be about an exotic sensual being, someone who dared to "mark" herself. It reminded me of a fierce sixties, feminist I know.

Also, something of the mystique of Joyce Carol Oates played a part in my purchasing this title. Although this is the first of her books I have actually read, her name has not vanished from some backdrop of writers I have kept in mind where she has lingered, since the early 90's when I first heard her read from her book about the Kennedy drowning affair (Black Water) at Borders Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

She was this slight, tiny, obviously intelligent, but also frail looking being with skin so pasty that she is like those academics you see... history professors and such, or French literary theorists, so bleached in completion as to seemingly have never spent an hour of their lives in the sun or with a lover. So, finally, a book of hers falls into my hands, and in spite of my own lack of exposure to the insides of her bookcovers, I purchased this book, haunted by her reputation as an intriguing and great American writer.

To my surprise, she did not hold up her appearance as a hothouse flower, but dove swiftly into dark sludge, beneath even the gutter level of the worlds she explores, into the sewage itself. How shocking that such a "protected" looking woman could write like that. Forget the sun, I would never have been able to come out of the house itself again. What torments, I wondered, live in such a being who can write such filth.

Yet her writing was compelling. I turned each page, unable to stop reading. Wondering, where, why was she taking us on this journey?

Halfway through, I knew I could not keep such a book in my library. I could not bear to have someone who loves me stumble upon such a darkened toilet bowl of human depravity. And yet, "I" kept reading, unable to contain my need to know what, where, why it could take me.

In the end, I am rooting for the lost Tattooed Girl. I want her to live, finally, to open her wings and fly.

And, as predictably as she is written, the all too eerily believable (we all know someone like her, but here, she is unleashed, all of the checks and balances tossed off) character of the sister comes in with her final act.

At the end, I threw the book into the trash. I got out of bed and had to wash my face and hands and feet with cold water.

I could not believe, even in America, a writer could go into the places that Joyce Carol Oates writes us to and get away with it.
And yet, and yet...

Days later, I continue to be haunted by her characters. I "feel" the Tattooed Girl and the man who never touched her and yet somehow washed her clean enough to both live and die in beauty finally. I continue to be affected by them. They not only transformed in the novel, but continue to even at death.

I think they are both redeemed, healed, made new again and freed of their "marks," their "markings," their own "required stereotyping." They have gone from the publicly unbearable inability to be visible as others "saw" them, (both adored and scorned) to finding some truth of existence in their own unspoken and unneeded to be spoken truths, hidden so deeply within their own characters that even they are surprised to find them revealed.

There are truths and there are truths.

Joyce Carol Oates has taken me on a journey so deep and so dark that even I do not understand why, amidst all this waste, I see her brilliance like a light over the soul.
A haunting book, one I will not easily get over, nor pretend to understand.
If I am brave enough, I may "have" to buy another copy and put it in my secret library.

Oates has done it again. Just when we thought she was going soft with middle aged romances and blonde biographies along comes another modern, gruesome, gothic novel. In the tradition of Man Crazy and the Rosamond Smith serial killer novels, Oates returns to some of her favorite territory, the stalker with murder in mind. Here the usual territory takes a decidedly literary twist. The object of all this attention being a classical author, very much like Philip Roth, coincidentally the man Oates has singled out for her dedication. Poor Roth, or Joshua Seigl in the book, is in for a tough time. Oates has several villains in this piece, a barely literate girl deliciously contrasting our literally self-absorbed hero, a psycho boyfriend, and a sister from hell to torment her secluded writer brother. Get set for a fun ride, and some thoughtful musings about evil's random victims.

Oates has been occupied of late with rewriting some of her past literary works, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and them, but she is not too preoccupied to continue her now grand old tradition of creating a spooky thriller. I just want to know when she has time to eat.

I have now read a lot of Joyce Carol Oates books, my favorite being The Falls, couldn't finish Blonde, because it was too painful...But this book, The Tattoed Girl was an amazingly suspenseful, outrageously painful portrayal of incorrect assumptions, hatred, anti-semitism, and in essence was a fast-paced book, that left you breathless. It will be a long time before I can forget the pace of this very well written book. Would I recommend it, maybe for those that are not too sensitive, also I am on a Philip Roth kick, and the author dedicated it to Philip Roth,...

Joyce Carol Oates is my favorite author and I have been reading her since I was fourteen years old, but I'm very sorry to say this is the worst thing she's ever written. I won't state that there is automatically no legitimacy in a novel filled with characters whose personalities and weaknesses make them unlikable, but in this case the sheer revulsion I felt for each and every character infesting this book drove away my interest, empathy, and ultimately my desire to commit much I read here to long-term memory. From its anti-Semitism and ruined lives haunted by the past, to the cruelty and devious evil others within this short novel brought into the plot, I discovered little here that was either edifying or that worked well in generating expressions of wisdom sired by an ultimate understanding of what motivated each person in this painful story. Does this diminish Joyce Carol Oates in my regard, or will it make me reticent to read her works in the future? Absolutely not. The woman is a living treasure and I avidly await each new release of an Oates book. It's simply that in this case, she turned out a book I disliked past my ability to embrace it.