Breathe: A Novel Joyce Carol Oates, Reviewed by Pete Warzel

Review by Pete Warzel

Terror…. Breathe. “He must breathe. He must not stop breathing.” A wife struggles with her overwhelming fear and attempts to maintain calm, nursing her husband as he careens towards death, unexpectedly, quickly, finally.

Joyce Carol Oates, at the age of eighty-three, still has the ability to become someone else, to get into her characters’ heads, and convey a sense of being intimate with the subject, in this case so thoroughly and terrifyingly inside the head of a grieving widow. Oates wrote one of the best pieces of short fiction I have ever read, Papa at Ketchum, an imaginative enactment of Hemingway’s last days. (One of the pieces in her book Wild Nights!) She becomes Hemingway so thoroughly you are seduced into believing Hemingway is narrating, internally, the road to insanity and his eventual suicide. It is stunning. It is terrifying. She creates the man as his mind disintegrates, and accomplishes much the same here.

Gerard McManus and his wife Michaela are in residence at the Santa Tierra Institute for Advanced Research where he is working on editing his magnum opus, The Human Brain and Its Discontents. A distinguished Harvard professor, he is loving, tender, older than his wife by eleven years, and a well-respected academic who can command the stage when he presents. She is a writer of memoirs, and teaches a seminar in writing at a satellite campus of UNM. They are living in a rented house not far from the Institute where Michaela lives alone after a sudden illness turns a quick hospital stay for her husband into the last stages of cancer, and a vigil that only has one ending. In the house she panics, remembers, and confronts her demons, real and imagined.

A literary theme of the novel is that of Orpheus and Eurydice. Reversed, then reversed again. Michaela buys tickets for the Christoph Gluck’s opera, Orpheus and Eurydice, (Orfeo ed Euridice), hoping her husband will recover. As she nurses him, wills him to live, she is trying to lead him from the gate of Hades, the first reversal of the myth. Later in the book, in a harrowing section, (or is it a dream sequence?), an imagined Gerard tries to lead her into hell, the reverse back to male/female action in the myth, but a reverse from/to. The rhythm and memory of the myth throughout the book works. “Hope is the poisoned bait. Men eat of it and die.” 

The book also begins and ends with the same titled chapter – “A Voice Out of a Fever Cloud”. In its last place variation it is abbreviated, but the remaining words are exactly the same. In the first iteration we assume it is Gerard, perhaps in a coma, thinking of whomever, his wife perhaps, trying to lead him out (read Orpheus/Eurydice), holding his hand begging Breathe. In the last is it Michaela now, headed to the underworld, or back to the real world, her dead husband urging her to Breathe. Or is it? Perhaps it is simply a return, in her mind, to hope. The end is the beginning, and round, like Joyce’s rivverun past Eve and Adams….

So, why bother with reviewing a best-seller here, where we normally deal with New Mexico writers, or the history or art of the state? The book takes place in New Mexico, in the fictional city of Santa Tierra, an hour away Albuquerque by car. It is not Santa Fe, but it is, or a composite. There is the Institute, a walk to the renowned opera house, shopping for tschotskes, a memoir writing seminar at the University of New Mexico.

So, three thoughts here. I do not understand why Oates bothers with fictionalizing the landscape, the pueblos and their languages, when the real would do well enough. It seems an unnecessary invention, a detour that is inefficient and even irksome, given the citations of Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Busy work, I think. The second thought then is that it is flat with no life to this very alive landscape. She does not write New Mexico well, rather simply presents a poor resolution postcard of the land, even of the cultural climate. The third is this: Oates makes an attempt at New Mexico mysticism, twining the magical realism of native myth with a stilted search for spiritualism. The result is something hideous really, certainly not a reflection of native culture or mystical landscape. But maybe we know too much living here, and this fictional goop is fascinating to readers in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

On the other hand, this is a powerhouse of a novel. The momentum towards death is almost unbearable inside Michaela’s mind, and following the widowhood with the imbalance at being one instead of two, her madness shapes reality in sinister ways. Oates can write emotion, intellect, psychological infirmity, and angst so well, that she might have stuck to the knitting here and not delved into a fictionalized place.

 The book is dedicated to her husband, Charlie Gross, in memoriam.  

Breathe
Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco
Hardcover, 384 pages
$28.99