TERMINAL VELOCITY

IN THE LAND OF JOYCE CAROL OATES, WHERE BAD DEEDS MEET WORSE LUCK

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 31, 1997

Page: N13

Section: Books

``Man Crazy'' is a fairly gruesome little novel, best read without attention to the hyperbolic jacket copy, which tries to make the story deeper and larger than it is, and also gives away its one-two punch. Its narrator is Ingrid Boone, now a young woman, whose memories retrace an itinerant childhood and adolescence in upstate New York (the Oatesian land of dead-end lovers, bad winters, and minimum-wage jobs). The novel opens in a psychiatric ward where the adult Ingrid has been shipped from prison after she took a fork to her wrist. That cameo gives us a pretty good idea of just how bad it is inside her head, and warns us we're about to find out why.

Cut to 1972, when Ingrid was 5, and her beloved daddy -- a Vietnam vet named Lucas -- was on the lam for his involvement in a drug murder. Ingrid and her mother, Chloe, try to keep up with Lucas's felonious travel log for a time, hanging out in safe houses, waking to the smell of last night's beer and cigarettes and the fear of what the day entails. With Lucas chasing bad-guy dreams all over the country, Chloe soon enough winds up on her own -- roaming the towns on the Chautauqua River, a pack of smokes and a hangover and a little girl in tow. Their lives are depicted with a day-to-day grind of crummy jobs and overbearing men: Chloe, a gorgeous woman who gets offers on every street corner, sleeps with whoever treats her decently, and Ingrid waits for Lucas to come home. It is the inner picture of a too-familiar life, earnest and destitute at once, and far too often at the mercy of chance.

Forging a reality from this milieu, Ingrid is a child defined by nerves and longing, picking incessantly at her skin, fantasizing about the friends and boyfriends she doesn't have. She watches her mother obliterate herself with Old Grand-Dad and witnesses a couple of horrid episodes involving Lucas's return. Adolescence screeches up like a runaway car, with all the ensuing dangers: When boys offer Ingrid rides, she offers herself in return -- expecting to find in those 10-minute pledges of lust some promise of finally being claimed.

Momentum is a technical feat Oates can accomplish in her sleep, and ``Man Crazy'' is no exception: Ingrid's cataclysmic life has the desperate force of water headed to the sea. Reared on the living-room glimpses of a mother beholden to any man who'll care for her, the girl takes solace wherever she believes it exists -- which is almost nowhere, of course, because she's too fragile and wounded to look in the right places. The aching emotional center of the novel reveals itself when Ingrid is 15, and has won, against all odds, first prize in a high school poetry contest. (Her sweet intelligence is mostly masked by her emotional troubles; when she turns in her own good homework, most teachers doubt its authenticity.) Sick with fear and self-loathing, her skin ablaze with the violence she has visited upon it, she sabotages her performance before the school assembly. It is a horrible moment -- worse, in fact, than all the bedlam that follows -- and it's as clear a marker for the rest of Ingrid's story as a divining rod quivering toward the ground.

What makes ``Man Crazy'' such an intense day trip into the abyss is Oates's juxtaposition of Ingrid's innocence with her fate. Like ``Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,'' Oates's short story about a perilous seduction, the novel is a collision of environment and emotional history with circumstance -- the horrors waiting at the end of the road, if our own journey is unfortunate enough to take us there. It comes as no surprise that Ingrid the teenager is soon stoned out of her mind on LSD, then heroin, and desperately enthralled by awful men; this is a girl who, on the day she heard her name proudly announced in school assembly, became weak-kneed at the sound of its ``singular ugliness.'' We don't often realize how short the leap between pathological frailty and social deviance; Oates all but owns that territory, and ``Man Crazy'' captures the dizzying fact of it.

Ingrid's swift passage from victim to perpetrator will go undescribed here, as much of its power derives from its blind-side surprise. But let's not mistake this macabre diversion for what the galley copy calls Oates's ``exploration of family love and possibilities of human redemption.'' ``Man Crazy'' is a series of interconnected stories, many of them published in the literary quarterlies, all linking Ingrid's treacherous descent with the high-pitched psychological intimacy at which Oates excels -- and often abuses. Ingrid's italicized, exclamation-mark insights are irritating and feel like sloppy shortcuts; the ending of the novel -- whether it's meant to be darkly ironic or a truly happy outcome is never made clear -- is patently absurd. One almost suffers a bit for poor Ingrid Boone, made to endure yet one more narrative travesty, this time at the hands of her creator.

But ``Man Crazy'' goes onto the Oatesian B-list of ghastly admonitions, the story of a young woman's repetition-compulsion of a little girl's trauma. Parents, read it and clean up your act.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

From ``Man Crazy''