Beasts /

It's de rigueur to exclaim over Oates' protean output and unwavering excellence, and rightly so. The ink has barely dried on her last novel, Middle Age [BKL Jl 01], as this deliciously gothic tale appears. It's the mid-1970s, and the students at the small New England all-girls college that Gillian, Oates' compelling narrator, attends are under the spell of their poetry teacher, Andre Harrow. He tells his young, pliable charges to "go for the jugular" in their writing and ignites the sexual tension in the air by reading them the stunningly erotic poetry of D. H. Lawrence. Enthralled, Gillian believes she loves Harrow and becomes obsessed, too, with Dorcas, his voluptuous sculptor wife, who makes sinister "totems," carved wooden figures that express a bestial sexuality. Meanwhile, fires are breaking out all over campus, students are turning suicidal, and Andre insists that his elite writing group read their private journals aloud. Oates' control of this smart, steely tale of the baser side of human nature is absolute, as are its dark and scintillating pleasures. Donna Seaman

In her new novella, the prolific Oates paints a riveting picture of a time when drugs were viewed with a more tolerant eye and sexual promiscuity was the order of the day. The story revolves around a group of college girls in the 1970s and their obsessive preoccupation with charismatic anti-establishment English professor Andre Harrow and his artist wife, Dorcas. The two stand out in their small New England college town, and they revel in their difference, which draws Andre's female students to him like bees to honey. A talented and infatuated junior, Gillian is relegated to the shadows until Andre picks her out as one of his "special" girls. What follows is a disturbing look at the power of obsession and the abuse of trust. The story, though implausible in today's world, is quite believable in its 1970s setting. It's a quick read at 128 pages but suspenseful and satisfying to the end, with Oates once again displaying her amazing flair for complex and slightly bizarre characters. Recommended for all fiction collections. Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland Lib., OR (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Oates's newest novella is a tale of academe similar to (though darker than) such earlier books as The Hungry Ghosts (1974) and American Appetites (1989). The story begins and ends in Paris, in the Louvre, where protagonist Gillian Brauer observes a garishly expressionistic "totem" that triggers buried memories of her college years. Oates thereafter moves backward and forward in time and among a catastrophic 1975 house fire in a college community in Massachusetts's Berkshire Mountains, the events leading up to it, and Gillian's conflicted feelings about the couple who "adopted" her, and her own inchoate sensibility and sexuality. At Catamount College for Women, in the wake of the permissive, volatile late 1960s, Gillian falls under the spell of her literature professor Andre Harrow, a charismatic (if vaguely goatish) mentor who chants D.H. Lawrence's "voluptuous" verses to his poetry-writing seminar students, and teasingly addresses withdrawn Gillian as "Philomela" (a telling allusion to Ovid's Metamorphoses). Meanwhile, a series of small fires set by an uncaught arsonist terrifies Catamount's students (two of whom happen to be named Sibyl and Cassandra)-as Gillian finds herself attracted as well to Harrow's sultry French wife Dorcas, a sculptress whose powerfully animistic, "primitive and dramatic" half-human figures hewed out of wood hint at elemental experiences Gillian is only beginning to imagine. Their correlative is Andre's classroom mantra "Go deeper. Go for the jugular." As Gillian becomes the latest of a number of students made the Harrows' sexual and domestic slaves, Andre's imperative that artists must acknowledge their pagan, animal natures and act accordingly is ironically fulfilled as is the motto engraved on Dorcas's creations: "WE ARE BEASTS AND THIS IS OUR CONSOLATION." It's not subtle, but it works. Whenever Oates (Middle Age, p. 970, etc.) composes at this length, she doesn't pad or overwrite. The result is a cunning fusion of Gothic romance and psychological horror story, and one of her best recent books.