Beasts
Ratings5
Average rating3.4
15
Ratings5
Average rating3.4
A bright, talented junior at Catamount College in the druggy 1970s, Gillian Brauer strives to realise more than a poet's craft in her workshop with the charismatic, anti-establishment professor Andre Harrow. For Gillian has fallen in love - with Harrow, with his aesthetic sensibility and bohemian lifestyle, with his secluded cottage, with the mystique of his imposing, russet-haired French wife, Dorcas. A sculptress, Dorcas has outraged the campus and alumnae with the crude, primitive, larger than life-sized wooden totems that she has exhibited under the motto 'We are beasts and this is our consolation'.As if mesmerised, Gillian enters the rarefied world of the Harrows. She is special, even though she knows her classmates have preceded her here. She is helpless. She is powerful. And she will learn in full the meaning of Dorcas' provocative motto . . .
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"But I thought that was what poetry is, Mr. Harrow: circumspect. If it wasn't it would be just talk."
I thought I would enjoy this, and for the first few chapters I found the familiarity of it encouraging. Consider the premise: a young woman at a Bennington-like college, her literary aspirations, the lecherous married professor into whose circle she drifts, the peculiar roommates, her sense of alienation, and the suggestion of something darker lurking at the edges. Because I've had the good fortune to have read Ms. Jackson's (Don't call her Shirley) brilliant, hypnotic, disturbing [b:Hangsaman|131177|Hangsaman|Shirley Jackson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1302734503s/131177.jpg|1825944], reading Beasts filled me with a powerful sense of deja vu.
Admittedly, the part of Hangsaman where the heroine, Natalie Waite, befriends and is charmed by a youngish professor and his somewhat unhinged wife makes up only a small part of the novel. It's as if Oates had decided to rewrite the older novel by concentrating only on the relationship with the professor and turning all of the subtext into text.
It might have worked. Oates is definitely a talented enough author to pull it off. Still, I found myself approaching its violent conclusion not with tension or glee but a sense of indifference, a lazy shrug. Maybe it is just the comparison with Hangsaman. Jackson knows how to zig when you think she'll zag, knows how to pull you into her protagonist's headspace as if the text had magic properties.
For all of its modern Gothic gestures, Beasts feels disappointingly linear, it's characters surprisingly flat. When it finally brings on its lurid revelations, they felt like the punchlines to jokes I had already heard.
Interestingly, circumspect means “cautious, prudent, or discreet.” I'm still asking myself whether the novel was too cautious or if it would have benefited from some discretion.
If Beasts were a movie, it would be rated R, R for raunchy and revealing and reviling and revengeful. The story centers on a young college student who falls in love with her writing professor and his wife. The professor reads poetry from D. H. Lawrence and exhorts his students to go for the jugular, seducing every girl in the class with his voice and his eyes. Gillian, like the others, falls for his charms. When the professor and his wife head off to Europe for Christmas break, Gillian discovers photographs that reveal the identities of others the two have used and discarded. The professor and his wife have wielded the power of their bohemian lifestyle on the innocents of the college to suit their own purposes. Gillian responds with fury and gets her revenge.
