“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
by Joyce Carol Oates
from the October 14, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
This week Joyce Carol Oates takes us back to the idealic setting of Hazelton-on-Hudson, only recently there have been a series of natural disasters. The land is falling apart. The residents are dying of various diseases. The central character, Luce, watches in horror while still trying to find some kind of normalcy her husband demands. The story starts with a bit of this:
This matter of the face mask, for instance.
Well, just a half mask, a green gauze mask, of the kind that medical workers wear. Not a full-face mask — that would be ridiculous.
Even before the floods, landslides, and firestorms of the past several years, Luce (sometimes) wore a gauze mask. Not in public! Just at home.
I’m always glad to see Oates show up in the magazine. She is so prolific I don’t even know where to begin with a deep dive into her work, but I like it when her short fiction shows up on a Monday morning.
What do you think about Oates’s spin on Jonathan Edwards’ famous 1741 sermon? Please let me know below!
Joyce Carol Oates “Sinners In The Hands of An Angry God” is an excellent fictional snapshot of an upper middle class couple. It seems a very unbiased rendering of environmental issues that affect this couple. It is such a clear picture that she touches on the quality and state of marital relationships, getting older, sicknesses taking away friends and acquaintances and the supreme difficulty of playing an instrument in a string quartet. It is such perfect writing. The sermon could be interpreted as describing hellish punishment for sins of both omission and commission re poisoning of the environment and all its side effects. That seems a secular interpretation. And ironically the earth and the environment were so much more pure however long ago it was when that preacher preached his sermon. That was most likely predicting the burning in Hell of people who committing any of the seven deadly sins and lesser misdemeanors like unkindness, withholding love at key moments and other stuff that is totally forgotten except when taken up by the Hallmark Channel in their films. But assuming the religious values still dwell a little differently in the secular world; leaving plastic in the oceans is unkind to fish, dolphins and whales and not loving them enough at the right moment; not caring about them enough. And that is not to even mention felonies like rape, robbery, homicides, genocides, hate crimes, terrorism and war. A excellent writer puts us in touch ever so gently with a certain temporal world and shows how the past, in a slightly different form suggests truth about how the future can unfold out of vestiges from the past. I especially admire how Oates conveys how she feels about today with a little humor, tact, a subtle dispassionate restraint, without any real anger or urge to lecture or scold. So in the end it is just the truth of what the eyes saw and the spirit felt or feels. So that we can actually look at what is going on. This was awesome and we would all benefit from the finer qualities of Oates’ story showing up in national and international discussions of the issues it raises.
Larry —
I’m going to have to drastically disagree with you this week. As someone else wrote of a recent NYer story, it wouldn’t have been published if the author hadn’t been a longtime contributor.And if it hadn’t been topical — climate change. Though the connection of the illnesses to climate change is left vague, mystical.
In this story, Oates outdoes herself in clunkiness. That paragraph where she lists all the diseases that the residents have is way overdone. As is the one about all the procedures they are having. A story about health insurance? Really?
A person may be old, but that doesn’t mean they have to write about old people’s concerns. Especially when she doesn’t deliver any wisdom of old age. Or any true emotion about growing old.
The wife, subordinate to her husband, is such a cliché.
“Thirty years. Her life decided for her.”
“Rebuffed, Luce retreats. Laughs awkwardly, apologetically.”
Oates is writing out of the 60s. Move on, lady. Her last story, “Mastiff”, was better, but also featured a woman who ultimately let herself be captured by a strong man.
If the fiction editor is going to fail. at least he/she could fail by taking a risk on a new writer.
I think the “incantations” of the illnesses and procedures is perhaps meant to remind the reader of the distance between the mystical, emotional appreciation of death of the pre-modern era, the “death and and the maiden” era where metaphor and tone were how we humans communicated and shared these powerful occasions of loss, and the modern, medicalized, prosaic era. And, yet, isn’t the theme of the story to remind us that the named illnesses are just a different version of the parent shushing the child: “Have no fear, that is just the fog, the birch, the dappled sunlight, and not the Erlking….” We lullaby ourselves to the ultimate sleep, with new songs.
A rakish, mocking, masked Andrew appears at the end. Luce is digging. Black-eyed Susans in the miasma. The second to last paragraph, the tarantella? Is it really Andrew? Or…
And I think Oates has a little joke at the end…. “Hel-lo!” Andrew calls. My generation knows the childhood rhyme: “Hello everybody this is Mr. Cemetery, if you’re good you go to heaven if you’re bad you go to…. Hell…O everybody, this is…”
Maybe Oates’ point or joke is that with all the disease, the fires, and God knows what all, the Hell of the sermon is already unfolding on earth. Surely all the mass shootings, the opiates causing an epidemic of death and
all the bad stuff, you won’t have to wait on a long line to get there and even if you were, there is no rush. Always whatever appears can be seen differently plus different observations help in viewing the same thing differently. The husband was definitely not as aware as the wife.
I particularly liked the way the story did something old-fashioned in regard to the piece of music, which was to allow it to have a deep, possibly spiritual, effect on performers and audience. It also brought the variously damaged people of the community together, in spite of the depressing state of their own physical and/or mental health and that of the environment. And they seemed the better for it.
There’s an interesting irony in how physical calamity seems to be hitting the folks in the story at relatively early ages, at least from the narrator’s point of view. But, on the other hand, the composer of the “Death and the Maiden” quartet died at 31. Hmmm… what is Oates saying with that?