Pick up this book if you're interested in: infanticide, matricide, patricide, fratricide, suicide, alcoholism, heroin addiction, porn addiction, fetishism, human cloning, incest, blackmail and religious delusions. Avoid it if a constant onslaught of the baser forms of human behaviour either offends you or bores you after listening to the audio version of Dear Husband for a couple of weeks. The way that each story started from the perspective of a reasonably normal narrator, who would then either reveal themselves to be monsters or discover their intimates were monsters, reminded me of when I read a complete collection of O. Henry stories: when you're expecting a twist, it has little effect when it comes. Perhaps these stories would be more effective if they were spread out. I also really didn't enjoy the work of the three people who narrated the version I listened to, so that probably added to my impatience.
There were some stories that worked for me overall (The Blind Man's Sighted Daughters, Mistrial, Special, Magda Maria). I did quite enjoy Landfill, likely because I can feel for parents whose son is missing and can imagine the torture of dreading, and receiving, the call from the police that he has been found, dead. Better than just the plot was the revelation of how different the son and his behaviour were from his parents' image of him. This part was chilling to listen to:
The police investigation has yet to determine whether Hector died in the early hours of March 25th in the steep-sided Dumpster behind the Phi Epsilon frat house—where investigators found stains and swaths of blood, as if made by wildly thrashing bloody wings—or whether he died as many as forty-eight hours later, after lying unconscious, possibly comatose from brain injuries, until Monday morning, and then being hauled away unseen beneath mounds of trash, cans, bottles, Styrofoam and cardboard packages, rancid raw garbage, stained and filthy clothing, and paper towels soaked in vomit, urine, even feces. At approximately 6:45 A.M. on March 27th, he was dumped into the rear of a thunderous Tioga County Sanitation Department truck and hauled sixteen miles north of the city to the Packard Road recycling transfer station, to be compacted and then hauled away again to the gouged, misshapen, ever-shifting landscape of the Tioga County landfill… Only the police investigators can bring themselves to imagine that Hector Campos, Jr., may have been “compacted” while still alive.
But then when I was looking for that passage from the story online, I discovered that there was some controversy when Landfill was originally published in the New Yorker. Apparently, "John Fiocco, Jr., a college student at The College of New Jersey, died in the same mysterious way, and was discovered in the same way (at a landfill) a few weeks later. Oates even uses the date of Fiocco's own death/disappearance -- March 25." As there are real grieving parents involved, I don't know how fair it was for Oates to barely mask the real details in her fictional treatment. Most especially since in her story the dead kid was such a creep.
The title story, Dear Husband, is a letter written by a fictionalised Andrea Yates, explaining to her husband why she has drowned their five children and taken an overdose of painkillers. I also found this to be exploitative, and the fact that she blamed her actions on the voice of God and her husband's lack of help and understanding, superficial and non-compelling explanations, didn't justify the intrusion on the privacy of the very real people left behind in that tragedy -- I would be much more forgiving if Oates had written the story with some psychological depth regarding post-partum depression, or even used it as a statement about modern society.
Other stories were painfully long, turning inside out to be entirely different stories by the end (Cutty Sark, The Glaziers) or employ cutesy devices with willful misdirection (A Princeton Idyll, Dear Joyce Carol). In the end, each is a sensationalistic tale with people behaving badly, attempting to shock the reader, and I am likely too cynical to have been properly affected.
There were some stories that worked for me overall (The Blind Man's Sighted Daughters, Mistrial, Special, Magda Maria). I did quite enjoy Landfill, likely because I can feel for parents whose son is missing and can imagine the torture of dreading, and receiving, the call from the police that he has been found, dead. Better than just the plot was the revelation of how different the son and his behaviour were from his parents' image of him. This part was chilling to listen to:
The police investigation has yet to determine whether Hector died in the early hours of March 25th in the steep-sided Dumpster behind the Phi Epsilon frat house—where investigators found stains and swaths of blood, as if made by wildly thrashing bloody wings—or whether he died as many as forty-eight hours later, after lying unconscious, possibly comatose from brain injuries, until Monday morning, and then being hauled away unseen beneath mounds of trash, cans, bottles, Styrofoam and cardboard packages, rancid raw garbage, stained and filthy clothing, and paper towels soaked in vomit, urine, even feces. At approximately 6:45 A.M. on March 27th, he was dumped into the rear of a thunderous Tioga County Sanitation Department truck and hauled sixteen miles north of the city to the Packard Road recycling transfer station, to be compacted and then hauled away again to the gouged, misshapen, ever-shifting landscape of the Tioga County landfill… Only the police investigators can bring themselves to imagine that Hector Campos, Jr., may have been “compacted” while still alive.
But then when I was looking for that passage from the story online, I discovered that there was some controversy when Landfill was originally published in the New Yorker. Apparently, "John Fiocco, Jr., a college student at The College of New Jersey, died in the same mysterious way, and was discovered in the same way (at a landfill) a few weeks later. Oates even uses the date of Fiocco's own death/disappearance -- March 25." As there are real grieving parents involved, I don't know how fair it was for Oates to barely mask the real details in her fictional treatment. Most especially since in her story the dead kid was such a creep.
The title story, Dear Husband, is a letter written by a fictionalised Andrea Yates, explaining to her husband why she has drowned their five children and taken an overdose of painkillers. I also found this to be exploitative, and the fact that she blamed her actions on the voice of God and her husband's lack of help and understanding, superficial and non-compelling explanations, didn't justify the intrusion on the privacy of the very real people left behind in that tragedy -- I would be much more forgiving if Oates had written the story with some psychological depth regarding post-partum depression, or even used it as a statement about modern society.
Other stories were painfully long, turning inside out to be entirely different stories by the end (Cutty Sark, The Glaziers) or employ cutesy devices with willful misdirection (A Princeton Idyll, Dear Joyce Carol). In the end, each is a sensationalistic tale with people behaving badly, attempting to shock the reader, and I am likely too cynical to have been properly affected.
