NOTES ON OATES

You'd think that a bunch of tenth grade honors English students would be diehard readers, sprinting home every afternoon to kick back with a frosty Yoo-Hoo and some Kerouac. But this was not the case with Mrs. Martha Johnson's charges at Rockville High during the 1989 to 1990 school year.

Of course Brian Walsh, Kris Dhandaphani, Karen Potter and the rest of these honor roll slaves read A Tale of Two Cities, Julius Caesar, Hirsoshima and everything else that Mrs. Johnson assigned. But you got the feeling that most of them would rather French kiss a rattlesnake than read a book of their own volition.

For me extracurricular reading dated back to elementary school, when I read Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume tomes when my teachers weren't looking. By my sophomore year in high school my trusty paperback companions included Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. My classmates teased me about my bookishness, and Mrs. Johnson at once vindicated and humiliated me one day by telling them to shut their illiterate pieholes.

Sometimes she asked me to stay after class, and recommended books and authors she thought I might like. I have fond memories of our conversations in that dimly lit classroom, but I sometimes regret the day she planted Joyce Carol Oates in my consciousness.

Without explaining exactly why, Mrs. Johnson said Oates was right up my alley. I started off by reading her then-current novel Because it is Bitter, and Because it is My Heart. I felt fascinated and repelled by her violent and feverish prose, and couldn't wait to get my hands on more of her stuff. At the mall bookstore I gawked at her massive oeuvre, buying as many titles as my paycheck from Fabian Drugs allowed. Within a couple of years I burned through You Must Remember This, American Appetites and Black Water, but her sprawling American Gothic novels like Bellefleur left me cold.

Let it be known that I have my share of obsessive tendencies, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Whether we're talking Joni Mitchell CDs or bubble tea, when I like something I have to have as much of that thing as possible. Even at the height of my enthrallment I knew that Joyce Carol Oates was a potentially dangerous addiction because her grotesque subject matter disturbed me for days on end. Of course my compulsions overruled my common sense and I continued to read her neverending output at a breakneck pace. One of my favorites was her 1993 novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang.

Then the Golden Age of Oates melted. Starting with 1996's overrated We Were the Mulvaneys and continuing through the late 1990s, her books became so dark and gratuitously violent that I couldn't bare to finish them. Like my friend Rachel said, reading Oates can feel like someone's probing a part of you that's already dead. I mean, who the hell would curl up with her recent book Rape: A Love Story?

Needless to say I put my obsession to rest and moved on to brighter pastures. But I still think of her fondly sometimes because when she's good she's SO good.

On Saturday, April 22 Oates appeared at a Portland literary festival called Wordstock. At first I thought I'd skip it because - like I said- I feel like my passport to Oates Country has expired. But in the end I couldn't resist the opportunity to see this bizarre force of nature read to a crowd of about 300 at the convention center. She took to the stage in feisty fashion, complaining about the lack of intimacy in the huge room and some crappy jazz music that made it hard for her to concentrate.

Watching her I remembered why I used to be so taken with her. First she spoke eloquently about her writing process. Then, true to form, she read the beautifully constructed but incredibly disturbing story "Heat," which details the murder of two young girls.

After hearing this woeful tale it felt downright criminal to walk outside into a sunny day topped by a perfectly blue sky.