Wilder Oates

By R.Z. Sheppard

WONDERLAND by Joyce Carol Oates. 512 pages. Vanguard. $7.95.

Once again, it is time for this prolific lady's annual gothic revival. Wonderland is her tenth book in eight years--a body of work that includes the novel, them, winner of the National Book Award for 1969. Blind cruelty, hypersensitivity and bizarre compulsions are particularly graphic in her new book. Medical students turn flamethrowers on laboratory monkeys in the name of science. Young geniuses are made to perform like sideshow freaks. A poetic intern confesses to having broiled and eaten a human uterus.

Heavy Freight. Yet Wonderland is anything but a catalogue of cheap shocks and thrills. It is in fact the author's most ambitious novel--a long and breathless ghost hunt that attempts to confront that elusive subject, human personality. Where does it reside? More important, is it relatively stable or does it change faster than most people dare to think?

Miss Oates' vehicle for this heavy freight is Dr Jesse Vogel, a character who passes through a succession of other characters like a phantom walking through walls. Jesse Vogel resembles Jules in them. He possesses a sense of personal destiny that has been developed by trauma, unusual circumstance and a mysterious, glacial will power.

Vogel begins as Jesse Harte, the sole survivor of one of those Christmas family massacres in which the unemployed father shoots his wife and children and then takes his own life. He is adopted by Dr and Mrs. Pedersen of Lockport, N.Y., and assumes their name. The doctor is a Hegelian on wheels who, in his zeal for personal accomplishment, conducts dinnertime inquisitions, getting progress reports and dishing out praise and censure to his family.

In truth, Pedersen is a monstrous hypocrite who takes his ease with morphine. His wife, outwardly a model hausfrau, requires large doses of alcohol to get through each day. His daughter is a bloated math prodigy, compulsively fueled with candy bars. Jesse works hard to create himself in the image of the public Pedersen. But when he proves insufficiently loyal to the doctor's impossible standards, he is cast out.

Mechanistic Particle. Working his way through medical school, Jesse assumes his maternal grandfather's name, Vogel, and does brilliantly. He becomes an acolyte of great men and husband to the daughter of a world-famous physician. Death is no mystery to him; it is simply a cold, banal fact. Love is the great puzzle, and it keeps turning cancerous in his hands. At the height of his career, Jesse is an important Chicago neurosurgeon. Delivering a learned paper on "Retrograde Amnesia," he notes that in certain brain injuries recent memories are more easily extinguished than distant memories. "Is it a function of the normal brain," he asks, "to hold the present cheaply and to honor only the distant past?"

Vogel himself exhibits no memory in the usual sense. He seems to be an uneasy collection of disparate traits acquired from the men who have been most central in his life. He seems, indeed, to crave other people's personalities in much the way the Pedersens craved morphine, whisky and candy. Neither the author nor the reader is ever quite sure just what Vogel is--a series of conditioned reflexes linked to some sort of life force; a mechanistic particle of personalities; a maddened poseur. Only Vogel's wife suggests that her husband consists of "real units of personality, tissue or atoms or nerve cells, bits of flesh that are real and not imaginary, not insane." It is a mysterious, chilling and thoroughly unresolved idea that Miss Oates pursues with pure intuition, great narrative energy and unrelenting compassion and seriousness.

R.Z. Sheppard

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