Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates review – risk-taking and unforgettable | Joyce Carol Oates

Detroit, 1977. A serial killer known as Babysitter is on the loose. Assumed to be “non-white” and “from the city”, he abducts and murders young white children, usually boys, leaving their bathed, naked bodies to be found with – “as in a cruel parody of mothering” – their freshly laundered clothes folded neatly beside them.

Meanwhile, in the middle of the day, Hannah Jarrett – affluent 39-year-old Michigan housewife and mother of two – is making her nervous way down a plushly carpeted corridor on the 61st floor of the Renaissance Grand hotel. She’s here to meet a man she only knows as YK. A man who, having approached her at a fundraiser and suggestively brushed her wrist with his fingers, has tempted her into the first adulterous assignation of her 11-year marriage.

For lonely, bourgeois Hannah, who believes that “if a woman is not desired, a woman does not exist”, is searching less for sex (which is “repugnant” to her) than for a “soulmate”. Someone who will make her feel cared for, unlike her patronisingly taciturn businessman husband who, since the Babysitter attacks, keeps a Magnum revolver in the bedside drawer. In her gardenia-scented clothes and high heels, Hannah finally summons the courage to knock on the door marked “Do not disturb”. She is immediately pulled inside and the door locked. What follows is one of the most harrowing descriptions of a prolonged sexual assault that I can remember reading.

As Hannah leaves the hotel – and there are plenty of indications that she may not make it out of there – and drives herself, bruised and bleeding and broken back to her home on prosperous Cradle Rock Road, you assume that she’ll go to the police. But no. There, on a street where the houses are “set apart from one another on three-acre lots”, keeping neighbours safely out of view, she still cannot risk her husband knowing where she’s been. But more than that, though still traumatised, she is also elated: “I have a lover. A lover!” While the Filipino housekeeper makes smoothies for her children downstairs, she discards her soiled clothes and takes a shower, discovering that her breasts hurt “not unpleasurably”, reliving almost happily “that sinking sensation, the man’s desire, excluding her”.

When, that night, her young daughter becomes dangerously ill, she briefly comes to her senses, a mother again. Rushing her to hospital, she blames herself for the “contagion” she’s inflicted on her family. But when the child recovers and YK calls again with “instructions: place, date, time”, Hannah whimpers only the lightest of protestations before walking down yet another plush hotel corridor as numbly as a somnambulist.

Normally, I’d refrain from citing an author’s age, but here it merits disclosure. To be able to write with such tearing astuteness about such fiercely contemporary issues – for it’s impossible to read this novel without thinking of #MeToo and, as the plot takes on an increasingly racist tone, #BlackLivesMatter too – would be a feat for any author of any age. Joyce Carol Oates is, astoundingly, well into her ninth decade and this, perhaps even more astoundingly, is her 59th novel. That she is willing – no, determined – to go to the darkest, least politically acceptable edges of human emotion and behaviour isn’t so startling if you know her work. But here, even by her own standards, she has taken a risk. For the question that lurks at the heart of the novel – why, after such a brutal and terrifying sexual assault, does Hannah go back for more? – is an especially queasy one.

And it’s no spoiler to say that the second attack is worse than the first. And so explicitly and disturbingly narrated that it would actually verge on gratuitous to extract a quote here. Nor is it a reveal to tell you that the grip and pace of this novel – for yes, it’s also a page-turner – relies on events ultimately connecting up in the most satisfying, albeit grim, way.

Race, class, child abuse – it’s all here. Religion, too. For if evil engenders evil – another perennial Oates theme – it doesn’t feel all that surprising to discover that much of this novel’s sadistic horror can be traced back to a certain paedophile priest at a Catholic home for boys. And then there are the shadowy references to Hannah’s father, cigar-smoking “Joker Daddy”, who has left a trail of damage so great in his wake – the details unclear, yet all too guessable – that his daughter’s “deepest desire” is “to not be”. Is this why she seems to long for obliteration at the hands of a man’s “desire”?

As ever, Oates’s prose – almost insolently alive, littered with italics and exclamation marks, switching apparently recklessly back and forth through place and time – would seem to break all the rules. The result is nothing less than magical, a piece of work that is light yet dense, frenzied in its detail yet somehow also cool, measured and abstract. She’ll happily devote five pages to what can only amount to a minute or two of a character’s experience (one reason her novels are rarely short) but in so doing will take you straight to the heart of a moment – or, as here, the agonisingly strung-out minutes of a sexual attack – without remorse.

Perhaps to even wonder why Hannah is drawn so ineluctably towards her attacker is to underestimate the novel. Rather like Spike Lee’s chilling 1999 movie Summer of Sam – set, interestingly, in the same year – this is a wild and panoramic piece of work, the serial killer’s activities a mere backdrop to a pinpoint vision of a society with rottenness at its core. Definitely one of Oates’s finest achievements to date, Babysitter is an unforgettable portrait of an “oblivion beyond even evil”, one that ricochets around affluent, middle-class America but begins, all too distressingly often, with a priest and a boy in a darkened room.

Detroit, 1977. A serial killer known as Babysitter is on the loose. Assumed to be “non-white” and “from the city”, he abducts and murders young white children, usually boys, leaving their bathed, naked bodies to be found with – “as in a cruel parody of mothering” – their freshly laundered clothes folded neatly beside them.

Meanwhile, in the middle of the day, Hannah Jarrett – affluent 39-year-old Michigan housewife and mother of two – is making her nervous way down a plushly carpeted corridor on the 61st floor of the Renaissance Grand hotel. She’s here to meet a man she only knows as YK. A man who, having approached her at a fundraiser and suggestively brushed her wrist with his fingers, has tempted her into the first adulterous assignation of her 11-year marriage.

For lonely, bourgeois Hannah, who believes that “if a woman is not desired, a woman does not exist”, is searching less for sex (which is “repugnant” to her) than for a “soulmate”. Someone who will make her feel cared for, unlike her patronisingly taciturn businessman husband who, since the Babysitter attacks, keeps a Magnum revolver in the bedside drawer. In her gardenia-scented clothes and high heels, Hannah finally summons the courage to knock on the door marked “Do not disturb”. She is immediately pulled inside and the door locked. What follows is one of the most harrowing descriptions of a prolonged sexual assault that I can remember reading.

As Hannah leaves the hotel – and there are plenty of indications that she may not make it out of there – and drives herself, bruised and bleeding and broken back to her home on prosperous Cradle Rock Road, you assume that she’ll go to the police. But no. There, on a street where the houses are “set apart from one another on three-acre lots”, keeping neighbours safely out of view, she still cannot risk her husband knowing where she’s been. But more than that, though still traumatised, she is also elated: “I have a lover. A lover!” While the Filipino housekeeper makes smoothies for her children downstairs, she discards her soiled clothes and takes a shower, discovering that her breasts hurt “not unpleasurably”, reliving almost happily “that sinking sensation, the man’s desire, excluding her”.

When, that night, her young daughter becomes dangerously ill, she briefly comes to her senses, a mother again. Rushing her to hospital, she blames herself for the “contagion” she’s inflicted on her family. But when the child recovers and YK calls again with “instructions: place, date, time”, Hannah whimpers only the lightest of protestations before walking down yet another plush hotel corridor as numbly as a somnambulist.

Normally, I’d refrain from citing an author’s age, but here it merits disclosure. To be able to write with such tearing astuteness about such fiercely contemporary issues – for it’s impossible to read this novel without thinking of #MeToo and, as the plot takes on an increasingly racist tone, #BlackLivesMatter too – would be a feat for any author of any age. Joyce Carol Oates is, astoundingly, well into her ninth decade and this, perhaps even more astoundingly, is her 59th novel. That she is willing – no, determined – to go to the darkest, least politically acceptable edges of human emotion and behaviour isn’t so startling if you know her work. But here, even by her own standards, she has taken a risk. For the question that lurks at the heart of the novel – why, after such a brutal and terrifying sexual assault, does Hannah go back for more? – is an especially queasy one.

And it’s no spoiler to say that the second attack is worse than the first. And so explicitly and disturbingly narrated that it would actually verge on gratuitous to extract a quote here. Nor is it a reveal to tell you that the grip and pace of this novel – for yes, it’s also a page-turner – relies on events ultimately connecting up in the most satisfying, albeit grim, way.

Race, class, child abuse – it’s all here. Religion, too. For if evil engenders evil – another perennial Oates theme – it doesn’t feel all that surprising to discover that much of this novel’s sadistic horror can be traced back to a certain paedophile priest at a Catholic home for boys. And then there are the shadowy references to Hannah’s father, cigar-smoking “Joker Daddy”, who has left a trail of damage so great in his wake – the details unclear, yet all too guessable – that his daughter’s “deepest desire” is “to not be”. Is this why she seems to long for obliteration at the hands of a man’s “desire”?

As ever, Oates’s prose – almost insolently alive, littered with italics and exclamation marks, switching apparently recklessly back and forth through place and time – would seem to break all the rules. The result is nothing less than magical, a piece of work that is light yet dense, frenzied in its detail yet somehow also cool, measured and abstract. She’ll happily devote five pages to what can only amount to a minute or two of a character’s experience (one reason her novels are rarely short) but in so doing will take you straight to the heart of a moment – or, as here, the agonisingly strung-out minutes of a sexual attack – without remorse.

Perhaps to even wonder why Hannah is drawn so ineluctably towards her attacker is to underestimate the novel. Rather like Spike Lee’s chilling 1999 movie Summer of Sam – set, interestingly, in the same year – this is a wild and panoramic piece of work, the serial killer’s activities a mere backdrop to a pinpoint vision of a society with rottenness at its core. Definitely one of Oates’s finest achievements to date, Babysitter is an unforgettable portrait of an “oblivion beyond even evil”, one that ricochets around affluent, middle-class America but begins, all too distressingly often, with a priest and a boy in a darkened room.