Book Review

THE GUILT SHE LEFT BEHIND

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novel "Housekeeping.", Robinson, Marilynne

1990

Overview

''Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart,'' like Ms. [Joyce Carol Oates]'s recent novels ''You Must Remember This'' and ''Marya,'' has as its heroine a bright young woman (this one named Iris) who, in the course of the narrative, rises like a mote of light out of the tenebrous urban nether world to take her place among the cultured and secure and be recognized by them as one of their own. In the opening scenes of the novel, the body of a teen-age boy called Little Red Garlock is pulled from a river. The two main characters, Iris Courtney and Jinx Fairchild, share responsibility for the killing. They are in high school when it happens, both good students: Iris a girl compensating for a tawdry and disrupted home life with a passionate bookishness, and Jinx a basketball player enjoying local adulation and what seems the certainty of a college scholarship. In the novel's time and place, the late 1950's and early 1960's in upstate New York, there is no great likelihood that the authorities or the public will react temperately to what they have done or take extenuating circumstances into account - because Jinx Fairchild is black. The opening scene, the discovery of the body, is presented through the eyes of an unnamed fisherman who sees gulls with ''dangling pink legs like something incompletely hatched'' and to whom the river mist seems as ''clammy as the interior of another's mouth.'' The precision of this language is of a kind with the uncanny aptness of dream imagery, communicating its brilliant flood of sensory and emotional experience, which always beggars language. At the end of this scene, after the police and the curious onlookers have gone, the voice describes the waves' ''slap, slap, slap . . . like the pulse of a dream that belongs to no one, no consciousness, thus can never yield its secrets.'' Ms. Oates's book is full of such declarations of its method. ''No visual truth, only inventions. No 'eye of the camera,' only human eyes.'' Iris, whose mother chose her name to suggest not a flower but an eye, has learned this ''one clear truth'' from her uncle, a photographer who is as greedy to capture human images as Ms. Oates is herself, and is driven by the same compulsion to prove that there is not only an esthetic but also at least the suggestion of an order to be discovered in their sheer accumulation.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Courtney, Iris / Oates, Joyce Carol (1938- ) / Robinson, Marilynne