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"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
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(Rate Your Students)
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except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Endgame

UD settles into the EZ Recliner nihilism of Joyce Carol Oates short stories only when teaching The American Short Story. It little profiteth UD to be told that life is shit and then you die.

UD used to think her students might be up for this sort of thing, but they too are past the point where what Saul Bellow called Alienation, Inc. rings their bells.

Nonetheless, Oates is a major American short story writer, and if you're teaching the course, she's got to be there.


A recent story of hers, in the New Yorker, has upset people at the College of New Jersey (Oates lives in New Jersey). The Chronicle of Higher Ed recounts:


Joyce Carol Oates, a prolific writer who teaches at Princeton University, is drawing criticism for a new short story whose plot bears an uncanny resemblance to a tragedy that played out on a neighboring campus, the College of New Jersey, earlier this year. According to The Times, a newspaper in Trenton, N.J., Ms. Oates said the short story, “Landfill,” was influenced by the strange case of John A. Fiocco Jr., a College of New Jersey freshman who disappeared in March and turned up dead a month later in a Pennsylvania landfill.

But Ms. Oates said the story drew on other sources as well and was not intended to be a fictionalized version of Mr. Fiocco’s mysterious death. People at the College of New Jersey aren’t buying that. A professor denounced Ms. Oates for a “lack of compassion and humanity” in choosing to write about a recent tragedy that “can only add to the overwhelming pain the [Fiocco] family has already suffered.” The family has indicated that it plans to sue the college (The Chronicle, June 6).

For her part, Ms. Oates said she is astounded by the reaction, given that there are many differences between the protagonist of her story, which appears in this week’s New Yorker, and the real-life Mr. Fiocco. But there are also many similarities. Ms. Oates’s character disappeared after drinking, and so did Mr. Fiocco, his friends said. Both ended up in a trash bin on their campuses, and both were found later in a landfill.

Ms. Oates said the story was intended only as a reflection on what she described as the dark side of undergraduate life nowadays.




The story (feast your eyes) is indeed a pretty unembellished retelling of this latest of many alcoholic deaths on American campuses. The College of New Jersey incident is distinguished from others like it only by the extreme degradation of its trashbins and landfills, and these details no doubt inspired Oates, most of whose oeuvre is a testimonial to Samuel Beckett.

Just as the parents' lawsuit against the college will fail (if you could successfully sue schools when undergraduates died of alcohol poisoning, all schools except Harvard, whose thirty billion dollar endowment would keep it afloat for awhile, would have to close), so the understandable unhappiness of people at the college in the face of this gruesome theft (it stops being theft when you transform it into art) will go nowhere. Oates has issued her lame apologia about the dark side of undergraduate life; the story's been printed.

But it's worth pointing out what a very bad story it is. It has no point whatsoever. Its narrator revels in every sordid soupcon. Its prose is without style.


Next morning when Scoot woke up, groggy and dazed, with a pounding headache, a taste of vomit in his mouth, and dried vomit all down his front, he’d had to admit with the cruel clarity of stone-cold sobriety: They left me here on my back to puke and choke and die, the fuckers. His friends! His fraternity brothers-to-be! And he thought, Never again. Not ever. Meaning he’d de-pledge Phi Ep, and he’d stop drinking. But, somehow, the next weekend he’d come trailing back, couldn’t stay away. These guys are his friends, his only friends.

Except tonight there’s some kind of bad feeling again, Scoot’s feelings are bruised, but, fuck, he isn’t going to show it. Of the pledge class, Scoot Campos is possibly the alums’ favorite, he’s been given to know. Ethnic diversity — an idea whose time has come for Phi Epsilon.


Plodding, voyeuristic, thematically lifeless (the diversity thing is tossed in and forgotten, part of the tasteless salad of this tasteless tale), "Landfill" trashes the dead boy whose death it tells in order to titillate us.
Posted at: 10/10/2006 07:12:00 AM