BREATHE (Ecco, 2021) is a major new novel by Joyce
Carol Oates that once again plumbs the topic and tributaries of "marriage"--a theme familiar to even the most casual of Oates's reader. It concerns a husband and wife—Gerard and Michaela—who are
temporarily living in New Mexico where Gerard is engaged at an academic institute.
Michaela’s world tilts, as in an earthquake, when Gerard becomes suddenly and
gravely ill, requiring around-the-clock vigil and triggering severe and at times
terrifying emotions in Michaela.
The setting of New Mexico’s high desert is unfamiliar
territory for Oates (most of her work is set in upstate New York, New Jersey, Detroit), but no less vividly evoked on the page than her usual
settings. As always in Oatesworld, the location is inextricably tied to story;
the jagged desert escarpments, the “breathless” high altitude, and a pantheon
of Pueblo gods haunt the protagonist, Michaela, as she prays/wills her ailing
husband’s convalescence.
It is not a spoiler to say that her husband, Gerard, succumbs
to cancer and pneumonia, because the focus of the story is on Michaela. One could select from Oates’s vast oeuvre any number of stories/books
where a spouse, often a woman but not always, tumbles into a chaotic,
self-imposed or self-destructive delirium, at the marital or physical loss/separation
of the other spouse. An example of a male protagonist that comes to mind is
Jerome “Corky” Corcoran in WHAT I LIVED FOR (1994).
The image of a character jolted into a new and unfamiliar world echoes Oates’s lifetime fascination with Alice in THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, which she credits as one of her earliest influences. For example, Michaela is reminiscent of Ileana from an early Oates story “The
Dead,” a takeoff on James Joyce’s story of the same name and collected in Oates’s
MARRIAGES AND INFIDELTIES (1972)--a woman under totally different circumstances
than Michaela in BREATHE but nonetheless caught in a psychological pressure cooker that
leaves her somersaulting through hellacious, personal grief and loss and
romance.
Michaela suffers through sustained interior torment in counterbalance to the rudimentary functions of widowhood she must undertake,
from the disposition of cremains to the task of finishing Gerard’s last
manuscript. Some of this territory is familiar to readers of Oates's searing memoir, A WIDOW'S STORY (2008), about her marriage to Raymond Smith and, especially, the aftermath of his (unexpected) death. If there is autobiography to be found in Gerard, though, it is not principally Smith but Charlie Gross, Oates's second husband and the renowned father of cognitive neuroscience.
Oates renders Michaela’s confused sublimation into widowhood in the hallucinatory, dreamlike prose that has become a hallmark of her long career. As in her story “The Dead,” Oates employs a number of devices in her narrative style that
simulate the protagonist's psychological unbalancing: shifts between second-
and third-person points-of-view, the interrogative mood, elliptical and rhetorically repetitive prose,
and so on. This style can be irritating to the reader (as is Oates’s obsessive
employment of italicized prose), but it is ultimately effective in creating an
indelible literary experience that is at once utterly original and
frighteningly familiar.
FTC Disclosure: I received an electronic Advanced Reader's Copy of this novel from NetGalley.