"My Sister My Love" Questions the Meaning of Family

If you are convinced of the power of humans to overcome about any tragedy and survive with meaning intact, you will find confirmation when you read Joyce Carol Oates' story, My Sister, My Love. If, on the other hand, you are sickened unto distraction by the harm done to each other, you will find that view expressed with exactness.

My Sister, My Love is about a very very dysfunctional family written as though dysfunctionally, in the first person. The 19-year-old Skylar Rampike, not in control of anything at all, is in charge of providing the reader her only window on what happens to two children and their powerfully narcissistic parents.

With this disorienting view of events, we are obliged to adopt Skyler's point of view. Skillfully portraying a tiny skating prodigy, but somehow making it a common tale with its dragging inevitability. There are no mountain-top joys in this book. Only what should be sacramental acknowledgments of superb talent demonstrated by Skylar's little sister.

If Oates is a bit heavy-handed at times, her tactics work. My favorite example is the sister's name change from Edna Louise to Bliss by her crazed mother. Betsey Rampike's attempt to transform her daughter from little girl ice-skater to angel-queen frieze degrades the role of mother and little girl. Children, no matter how talented, don't bring in money and prestige. Fame, however, with a smile that can be manipulated and expertise that can be exploited, always does.

Because it is the premise of Skylar's story, I am not giving anything away to reveal that Bliss is murdered.

Her allure, of course, lives. The mystery of the murderer's identity seems almost secondary to what you and I, the readers, have in response to the lives demonstrated in this book. It could just be me, but murder seems somehow a crime secondary to larger ones. If such a hierarchy of wrongs can be.

Do we respond in kind with Skylar? Unsure of our own complicity? If the vain Bix and grasping Betsey, with more money than common sense and more ambition than self-discipline, are mockups of parenthood nowadays, Oates doesn't in the least jam such distasteful elixir down anyone's throat. In part, because she is so convincing in letting the damaged Skylar's escapist needs drive the telling.

Joyce Carol Oates, whose work I have admired for decades again renders some of the most commonplace adventures ripe with unbearable truths. The author is absolutely unflinching - in the way you would want your surgeon to be no matter how ghastly the thing found under his knife. I think it's a crime that Oates has never received a Pulitzer Prize.

(I'd also like to add that while I labeled the author "heavy-handed" with certain techniques of writing, it is I who have taken the suspect tactic of using the actual face of a human being to "attract you" to this written effort. The book's author has never done so. At least I've never seen a book cover with anything other than an artist's rendering of a child. Or, in the case of one shown here, the image of feet, only.)

(photo credit mahyaaa/7059886 photobucket)