Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific, even prolix writer, with more than 50 novels and short-story collections to her name. Yet she writes wonderfully of life’s uncertainties and of American reality in the raw. In her latest novel, I’ll Take You There, Oates returns to her old themes of violence, madness and sexual passion. The plot has many devilish twists, lurching along like a gothic raree-show.
We are in upstate New York in the early 1960s; a 19-year-old girl, Anellia, is studying philosophy at Syracuse University. Tiny and timorous, she is vulnerable to ridicule, and indeed her sexual and social awakening is to be troubled by bullies. A swot, Anellia boards in a tottering mansion amid her books on Plato. The landlady, Agnes Thayer, is an English-born disciplinarian with a weakness for gin. Despite her skimpy pittances, Agnes tries to instil an Edwardian sense of propriety in her lodgers.
There is fat chance of that. Her lodgers are all-American girl students with pointy D-cup bras and lacquered bouffant hair. As metropolitan sophisticates, moreover, they despise Anellia the provincial scholarship girl. She was brought up on a farm in rural New York by her German grandparents and alcoholic father, her mother having died young of cancer. The lodgers undermine Anellia’s small-town assumptions by inducting her into their undergraduate sorority, Kappa Gamma Pi. In a darkened chamber Anellia is subjected to masonic handshakes and quasi-satanic Kappa pledges. This is a cruel roughing-up, and Anellia resigns from the sorority in fear and disgust.
In a lecture hall, soon after, she falls for a black philosophy student, Verner Matheius. Ten years older than Anellia, Matheius has an imposingly aristocratic manner and scorns the glamour-puss Kappa tormentors.
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