{"id":4569,"date":"2015-07-06T07:13:09","date_gmt":"2015-07-06T11:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4569"},"modified":"2015-07-06T07:28:20","modified_gmt":"2015-07-06T11:28:20","slug":"jack-of-spades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4569","title":{"rendered":"***Jack of Spades"},"content":{"rendered":"
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(photo: Poker Photos, creative commons license)<\/p><\/div>\n

By Joyce Carol Oates <\/a>\u2013 This rather short (200-page) new psychological thriller is told as a first-person narrative by successful mystery author \u201cAndrew J. Rush.\u201d Rush thinks of himself with quote marks around his name, perhaps because he\u2019s beginning to realize identity is more ephemeral than he\u2019s heretofore believed. The reader soon learns he\u2019s begun secretly writing a new series of books under the pseudonym \u201cJack of Spades.\u201d These books are an exceptionally dark, crude, and surprisingly popular [!] departure from AJR\u2019s usual output. Worse, writing books under his own name is laborious, whereas Jack of Spades books fly onto the page from the tip of his pen.<\/p>\n

AJR is one of those intriguing characters, the unreliable narrator. He is self-obsessed, but not self-aware. The reader realizes immediately that, given a choice between behavior that makes sense and behavior that will get him into trouble, he will choose trouble every time. When a woman from the local community launches a baseless plagiarism suit against him, he has two choices: a) call his publisher\u2019s legal department; or b) telephone the woman and try to reason with her. You or I would lawyer up. AJR, of course, chooses b), which leads to a frightful scene.<\/p>\n

It turns out this plaintiff is slightly unhinged, with a history of suing prominent authors for stealing her outlines and ideas\u2014she\u2019s even sued Stephen King, his lawyer tells him\u2014and the court readily dismisses her complaint. But AJR can\u2019t let it go; he becomes obsessed with her. Added to this is the increasingly insistent voice of Jack of Spades who, like a malevolent Jiminy Cricket, goads AJR toward further steps in all the wrong directions.<\/p>\n

Early in the book, the dogged plaintiff reminded me of the fangirl-turned-vicious in Stephen King\u2019s Misery<\/em>. (Although Oates takes her novel in a different direction, the King thriller must have been in her mind, too, because she includes a reference to it.) Strangely energized by his growing fears, it is AJR who repeatedly courts a confrontation with his litigious nemesis, escalations conveyed vividly in Oates\u2019s tension-filled writing.<\/p>\n

This being a novel whose narrator is an author, it includes some early passages disguised as notes on craft that are actually deft foreshadowing. AJR is discussing the structure of the book he is currently working on and how he plans to include a contrasting \u201chero\u201d and \u201cvillain\u201d in alternating chapters, with the hero prevailing in the end. AJR and the asides from the Jack of Spades play those contrapuntal roles, as well. His planned final punishment of the villain is part of the implicit contract between mystery authors and their readers that allows for \u201can ending that is both plausible and unexpected.\u201d If there\u2019s a flaw in Oates\u2019s book, it is that the ending falls short of that goal.<\/p>\n

By making the narrator a somewhat high-brow mystery writer, Oates can quite naturally adopt a voice for the book that reveals a great deal about AJR in its pretentiousness and deprecating attitude regarding his wife and certainly the townspeople. As a reader, you probably won\u2019t like AJR, but it\u2019s delicious to see such a creep get himself into deeper and deeper trouble. It\u2019s too bad he takes others with him.<\/p>\n

A slightly longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website<\/a>.
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