Below the Radar

Joyce Carol Oates celebrates the seemingly small and trivial in her newest novel, ‘Missing Mom.’

By: Hilary Parker
   Words become true emotion somewhere in the translation between the pages of Joyce Carol Oates’ latest novel, Missing Mom, and the heart of the reader. The pain of 31-year-old Nikki Eaton over the sudden death of her mother is at once so profound and so simple, as is the novel itself. The minute details like Nikki’s attempts to de-punk her new hairdo for her mother’s funeral or her distress over the whereabouts of her mother’s cat ("I really identified with the cat," says Ms. Oates) make her pain so tangible it hurts. She is, deeply, missing her mom, as is Joyce Carol Oates.
   "The idea came after receiving a phone call from my brother about my mother," says Ms. Oates in a voice just loud enough to be audible. "The loss of a beloved person is shocking, irrevocable. Even though you know intellectually that it has to happen, there is a profound disparity between the intellectual and emotional awareness of death. "
   And so, she asked herself, what could she write that would have the emotional equivalence of a traumatic phone call. From that came the opening of her newest book, which she will discuss at Barnes & Noble in West Windsor Oct. 20.
   Of course, writers need an analogue, Ms. Oates explains — a way to take an experience, an emotion, that they have and dramatize it into something even more provocative and moving. And so she deviated from her own experience a bit in creating the plot of Missing Mom, but the places, themes and sense of loss are straight out of her own life. It’s no coincidence that Nikki is a writer, and somewhat bohemian. Just look at Ms. Oates.
   In Missing Mom, Ms. Oates returns to Mount Ephraim in upstate New York. The town, the setting of We Were the Mulvaneys, her critically acclaimed novel that was an Oprah’s Book Club Selection in 2001, is an area she knows. In addition, it is not unlike the Hopewell area where she makes her home. In fact, she points out that the town and its community are not too different from much of America.
   "American society is similar — middle-class and working people," she says, and in her novel she wanted to celebrate that part of our culture, and those people who often exist somewhere below the radar screen.
   "The kind of people like my mother, they are so needed in society, but they are not glamorous," she says. She points out that writers, including herself, typically write about high-profile women, like Marilyn Monroe (in her novel Blonde) and Hillary Clinton. Missing Mom is her first novel to have as its central character a homemaker, in the character of Nikki’s mom, Gwen.
   As Ms. Oates speaks with tenderness about Gwen, she is sharing her emotions about her own mother. Gwen cooks and does crafts, she volunteers to help others and she sees the good in everybody. She displays what Ms. Oates calls "the shrewd perceptiveness of the non-intellectual."
   "My mother did all these things," says Ms. Oates as she picks up a reddish-orange cardigan that is casually draped across one of the chairs in her office. Her mother made the sweater, she explains, as she fingers it fondly. She holds it in her lap, never quite putting it back down, and at some point later, she puts it on. It complements her shirt and chunkily beaded necklace perfectly, an ambiguous coincidence.
   "After my parents died, I thought of all the seemingly small and trivial things. They acquired, in retrospect, a profoundness that they didn’t have at the time," she says. She celebrates the small and trivial in Missing Mom, like Gwen’s charming habit of baking breads to give to friends and family. They had stored them away in their freezers and, after her death, there is a profundity in the fact that the breads are served at her own funeral luncheon.
   "Clare had a full loaf of raisin/yogurt/twelve grain. Aunt Tabitha had buttermilk/cinnamon/pumpkin seed — ‘Maybe just a little stale.’ Alyce Proxmire had small portions of several loaves including High-Fibre Sugarless/Saltless Carrot/Wheat Germ that Mom baked especially for her," writes Ms. Oates. In this little way, and many others, Gwen lives on throughout the novel, as Nikki and her sister, Clare, struggle with the pain of moving on with their lives after the shocking and sudden loss of their mother.
   For Ms. Oates, her own mother lived on throughout the novel as well.
   "I felt sad when I finished the novel because I can’t write the novel again. It’s almost like my mother was alive," she says. Her house is filled with clothes and crafts that her mother made, and as she constructed the novel, she often turned to them for inspiration. She pauses often as she speaks about her mother, to the extent that it is impossible to tell if she’s merely pondering her next statement or taking a few moments to handle her emotions. At the same time, though, her eyes light up as she shares stories about her mother. This novel seems to have been therapeutic for Ms. Oates, despite its emotional gravity. And, like readers who might need to take an emotional breather while reading Ms. Oates’ masterpieces, Ms. Oates herself sometimes needs to get away from the gravity of her novels.
   "If all I did was write novels, I would be quite emotionally exhausted and depressed," she says bluntly. In addition to her fiction, she writes extensive reviews for The New York Review of Books and works with her husband, Raymond Smith, to edit and publish the Ontario Review. She spends two full days teaching at Princeton University and is currently advising three students on their senior theses — all of which are novels.
   At times, even Ms. Oates takes a break from the literary world, in body if not in spirit. She is an avid runner, but has never been able to understand how people can listen to music or watch television as they run. For her, it is a time to ponder, to generate new ideas, and to compose new pieces of writing inside her head.
   At night, she can often be found reading, often in preparation for an upcoming review. She diligently reads authors’ entire bodies of work to get a true feel for their craft before reviewing their latest books. On occasion, she’ll watch television, typically documentaries. She takes a break from it all around 8 p.m. to cook dinner, which she and her husband enjoy around 8:30 p.m.
   And she loves her cats, Reynard and Cherie.
   "Reynard is a little like the cat in the novel in that he’s large and somewhat graceless," she says, laughing. Her signature seriousness lifts as she talks about her two cats, and she is at once eager to talk about the simple pleasures of her daily life. For instance, there are her favorite restaurants in Lawrenceville — Acacia and Chambers Walk. She loves the town of Lambertville, for its restaurants and charm (though she says it is becoming a bit "yuppie"), and for the tow path that she and her husband bike along. And, she is huge fan of Barnes & Noble ("such a great place").
   As she opens up, Joyce Carol Oates offers a glimpse into the day-to-day realities of her own life, in much the same way she portrays her characters’ lives. Combine this with the openness and depth with which she shares her own pain over her mother’s death through Nikki in Missing Mom, and Ms. Oates, though sometimes characterized as elusive, becomes profoundly knowable and likable.
   "What I wanted to do is celebrate ordinary life," she says.
Joyce Carol Oates will discuss her latest novel, Missing Mom, at Barnes & Noble Booksellers, MarketFair, 3535 Route 1 South, West Windsor, Oct. 20, 7 p.m. Copies of many of her other titles will also be available for signing. For information, call (609) 716-1570.