Joyce Carol Oates

This is a 79-page avant-garde novel of 20 chapters. It purports to be an account by Bobbie Gotteson of events from his near and distant past, culminating in his trial for murder. “You can’t beat human nature, Inside or Out”, he says. These and other references imply Gotteson is on a different side of sanity to everyone else. “I can play sane, like you. Like everyone.”

“The Maniac” Gotteson relates several scattered memories. Sometimes these are so impressionistic it’s hard to guess what has really happened. Other parts, particularly the court scenes, are more realistic, but not any more reliable. The judge or witnesses are apt to use a mixture of legalese and obscenities that clearly has emerged from Gotteson’s own head.

One of the most transparent chapters, Unrehearsed Interview, starts off sounding like a plausible session with a therapist. The psychologist soon begins a tirade against the “monkey-ugly sub-human”. Maybe this is what the psychologist is really thinking beneath his professional patter; maybe Bobbie sees the truth behind appearances.

The other chapters are even more murky, with flashes of recognition glinting through: a girl in a skirt giggling and struggling to free herself of her clothes starts screaming “I have a son your age,” and the reader realises she’s not a girl, and she’s not giggling.

The reality that can be inferred is this: Gotteson is a small, hairy man of about 30 who has grown up in several foster families, and been though prisons and mental institutions from an early age. He plays guitar and seems to have a certain charisma. He heads out west with his “old man” Danny, who may or may not be his real father, and there plays gigs and mingles with people on the fringes of fame. He maintains that he took part in test screenings, that his songs were plagiarised by other bands, that he was offered a part in a television show.

There are influences from the Charlie Manson story here. The obsession with appearing on television, famous names, the abandonment of reason and crossing over to the other side. Gotteson goes all the way, and that’s what makes the book difficult. It’s difficult to picture Gotteson being able to chat with people at a party. He seems too far out all the time.

Some of the individual chapters however are amazing. His intense engagements with the world about him are unsettling on many levels. In one he watches a small child playing with a doll and feels the immense power he has to destroy her. The feeling swells up, a lorry rumbles past, she turns to look at him and in that heartbeat the feeling brims over into love.

Gotteson plainly and simply is not human. This is what makes the work uncompromising and tinges it with genius. At times he has a sixties’ psychedelic sensibility: he talks about his soul, telepathic connections to others, he quotes his own poetry. But he is beyond guilt or pity. The killings are a bonding in the realm of the spirit, a moment when they join him on his side.

This is the poem in his head:

slowly we are overrunning the earth

spidermonkeys twittering climbing leaping leering

on broken banjos

the Jukebox of the 40’s could not cage us in

stunned, the arm of the mechanism pauses

paralyzed

when the Spider Monkeys inside

open soul-doors to us spidermonkeys skinned alive

the magic of My Passage on Earth

will be just another headline