THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, November 23, 1994 TAG: 9411220092
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: BY PEGGY DEANS EARLE
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
JOYCE CAROL OATES' 24th novel, ``What I Lived For'' (Dutton/William Abrahams, $23.95), is about a week in the life of a prominent citizen of Union City, N.Y. A very, very bad week.
From May 22 to 28, 1992, Jerome Andrew Corcoran (you can call him Corky) saw everything he touched in his sweet American dream of a life turn sour.
Not that he'd had such an easy time of it. When he was just 11, he witnessed the cold-blooded murder of his father and then his mother's progressive mental illness and death in a psychiatric hospital.
But Corky, at 43, felt he'd hit his stride. And why wouldn't he? He'd come a long way from Irish Hill, the working-class ghetto where he grew up. Women liked him. Heck, everybody liked the redheaded guy with the freckle-faced good looks (even though he was self-conscious about how short he was and that little paunch he was developing).
When he walked into places like the exclusive Union City Athletic Club, people knew Jerome Andrew Corcoran. He drove a $35,000 Cadillac De Ville. And, of course, there was Christina, his beautiful, sexy, married girlfriend.
So what went wrong that week? Well, first of all, Corky got all sorts of bad news about his finances, including the fact that Corcoran Inc., his development company, was in big trouble with the IRS to the tune of $400,000 in back taxes.
Then Thalia, the teenage stepdaughter from his previous marriage, disappeared. Would she try to kill herself again? And then, when Christina told him that her husband had known about their affair all along, Corky reacted violently and wound up drinking himself into the gutter. Literally.
It got worse. A young friend of Thalia's was found dead, and Corky, convinced it was the result of foul play by a political rival, decided to investigate himself. This got him into more trouble.
Corky suddenly began to feel like he was always on the outside of where he wanted to be.
Was he being paranoid or was he really excluded from last week's poker game, this week's party? And was it possible that his buddy, the mayor, snubbed him at a recent gathering?
Add to all of the above (and even more) the fact that Corky's most deeply held illusions are shattered upon learning some ugly truths about his father and his friends from Sean, the uncle who raised him.
In some ways, this is a typical Oates novel, showcasing her uncanny knack for taking the most benign situations and transforming them into such alien, threatening ones that even the thickest-skinned reader will squirm.
In other ways, it's like nothing she's written before. With Corky, Oates gives us the thoughts and fears of a self- and sex-obsessed Everyman, about whom she spares the reader nothing. No detail of his rambling stream-of-consciousness is excluded, down to the most repugnant sight or odor.
The problem lies in the amount of time it takes the author to warm to her subject. For nearly the first third of the 607 dense pages, there is a sense of self-conscious macho overkill, making Corky into a caricature. Ultimately, though, he lives and breathes. And like Tom Wolfe's Sherman McCoy, the more things go wrong for Corky, the more appealing he becomes. Readers may find themselves (as I did) silently cautioning the hapless hero, ``Don't do it!'' before the next false step.
Oates' writing has never been richer than in the series of vignettes that make up ``What I Lived For,'' many of them darkly, unforgettably funny. Like the flashback in which a very drunk Corky gets a young woman's earcuff stuck on his ear lobe and winds up in the hospital.
Or the scene in the morgue where he goes to look into the suspicious suicide and meets a wonderfully creepy medical examiner.
But Oates can also write lyrically and with great compassion about the common man. ``What I Lived For'' has the feel of an epic, although it is simply the story of a guy who went to sleep dreaming the American dream only to awaken in a cold sweat from his latest nightmare. And what has he lived for? What had Corky wanted? Nothing more than this: `` To be the real thing.''
So is the long, tortuous road to Corky's goal worth it? Let's put it this way: I, for one, will miss him. MEMO: Peggy Deans Earle is a staff librarian.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
``What I Lived For'' is the 24th novel written by Joyce Carol
Oates.
by CNB