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Someone must check out Joyce Carol Oates' garage for a DeLorean.
His new novel, "Hazards of Time Travel", seems to have escaped the space-time continuum. Although Oates began writing in 2011 and ends before the election of Donald Trump, the story feels burdened by the horrors of our Orwellian era. Even the author seems a little panicked by the pressing quality of this novel. Months ago, she tweeted"You feel strange that it will seem to be – obviously! – about T *** p Dark Age; in fact, it was / has not been completed for years.
This is perhaps the special instrument of sensitive novelists: a flow capacitor that allows them to record what is happening on the horizon. In this case, Oates rephrased our present moment as "an interlude of indecision," a period of heated debate about the need for PVIWAT (patriotic vigilance in the war on terror). In the dark future that she imagines, the Constitution has been suspended and the RNAS (Reconstituted North American States) is a violently xenophobic and officially racist country.
(Ecco)
OHSTFAIIFOI (Oates saw the future and he is full of initials).
Adriane Strohl, a 17-year-old high school student, is the heroine of this dictatorship of capital cities. Despite all her efforts, Adriane can not hold her curiosity or hide her precocity, which is a problem in a True Democracy where "all people are equal," but some are more equal than others. At the beginning of the novel, she tells us, "I was not aggressive in class. I do not think so. But compared to my mostly sweet classmates, some of whom were sitting small in their desks, like partially folded papier mâché dolls, it is possible that Adriane Strohl stood out – unfortunate enough.
If you are a CR (Curious Reader), you might be tempted to wonder how Oates is channeling her own aggrieved experience as a brilliant teenager in the mid-twentieth century repressive world. Indeed, the novel quickly brings us back to this period. Accused of treason, Adriane is arrested at her graduation rehearsal for planning to deliver a speech filled with provocative questions. She was interrogated, tortured and marked as an exile. His punishment must be teleported to a mediocre Midwestern university in the late 1950s, which tells us all we need to know about Oates' concept of hell. Orwell imagined a helmet of hungry rats; Oates gives us Wisconsin.
Adriane wakes up as a new recruit at the Wainscotia State University. Forbidden to tell her true identity to her roommates or to reveal anything about the future, she invents vague stories on the fly, like the Coneheads of Remulak, France. To complete her sentence, all that Adriane has to do is to be the "ideal student" – nice, bland, docile – but it's not easy for a curious young woman. Not only does she excel at school, but she falls in love with Ira Wolfman, her assistant professor of psychology. Very quickly, she fantasizes like a teenager Emily Dickinson:
Does he know?
Does he recognize me?
Is he also in exile – like me?
Poor Adriane is never sure what is happening to her, and whoever reads "The dangers of time travel" may feel the same way. At first, the clumsy political satire and feverish tone of the story suggest the making of a novel for young adults, but that's another trick. The plot ends up getting bogged down in B.F. Skinner's behavioral theories, which the kids will not find rewarding.
Adults, however, may be intrigued by Oates' astute efforts to create a time loop. His story that changes the history suggests that the alarming time in which we are stuck now looks like that golden age that we are still romancing. The old American paranoia about nuclear war with the Soviet Union anticipated our endless war against terrorism, an existential threat sufficient to justify any abuse of civil rights, any level of surveillance, any mechanism of exclusion.
Confused by the surreal elements of her mid-twentieth-century prison and terrified of never returning home, Adriane begins to see herself as a pigeon in a Skinner box being conditioned to react in an acceptable manner. At the same time, unpredictable shocks in history can reduce readers to a state of helplessness. Nothing – including a happy ending – is what it seems in this whirlwind of political and academic satire, science fiction and romantic melodrama. At age 80, after more than 40 novels, Oates continues to cast an extremely dark magic.
Ron Charles writes about books for the Washington Post and its hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.
Hazards of time travel
By Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco. 336 pages. $ 26.99.
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