Beasts

"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.

Erm. The jacket made this sound a bit more like a gothic horror romance than it was. Totally false advertising. Instead, I got a tedious period piece about spoiled college students in love with their wretched abuser of a professor and his sculptress wife. I found it tedious. And more a vehicle for Ms. Oates to show her own academic prowess than a suitable vehicle for storytelling. The crux of the book only takes about 30 of the book's 138 pages; everything else merely builds up to the plot. The characters are dull and drawn poorly, seen only vaguely through the main character's eyes; although, perhaps that is only because she's so obsessed with her professor. He's actually not terribly impressive. All the girls merely suffer from guru syndrome. The climactic ending is silly and overblown and a bit improbable, frankly, speaking as one who used to be a smoker. And I tired of the constant ‘beautiful Dominique' descriptions: Because she's secretly a woman of colour, she is bold and dramatic and exotic. And the main character, I swear, is in love with her. But that only serves to set Dominique apart, make her less rounded as a character. So, no. I wasn't into this one. For my first foray into a full-length JCO work, I was terribly disappointed.