
DATE: Wednesday, October 22, 1997           TAG: 9710220033

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E7   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book review 

SOURCE: BY DIANE SCHARPER 

                                            LENGTH:   78 lines

OATES TAKES READERS ON DEPRESSING TRIP

A TENDENCY toward violence can be seen in the stories told about the inhabitants of Port Oriskany, N.Y. Earl Meltzer, for example, went to the house where Lena, his wife, was living with another man, picked up his two daughters, Cheryl and Doreen, and took them to the campground, where he put a bullet through each of their brains, and one through his own brain, too.

Ingrid Boone, an inhabitant of Port Oriskany and the protagonist of ``Man Crazy,'' by Joyce Carol Oates, hears that story when she is only 5 years old. One night after a violent argument between her mother and father, she sees the ghosts of two little girls, who, an aunt tells her, are the Meltzer daughters. The ghosts do not frighten her; they make her sad, as if something bad is going to happen, which it does.

Many bad things happen in the tough, small city of Port Oriskany, also the setting of several previous novels by Oates, an award-winning and prolific writer.

The bad things in her family could be said to have begun shortly before Ingrid was born, when her brother died from meningitis. Outwardly, her mother, Chloe Boone, blames the doctors for not recognizing the disease in time. But she also blames herself. By the time her second child, Ingrid, was born Dec. 11, 1967, she had already begun drinking.

Perhaps Lucas Boone, Ingrid's father, also blames himself for the death of his small son. This was why he enlisted in the Navy to serve in Vietnam shortly after his daughter was born. When he returned from Vietnam a few years later, he was a changed man.

The changes are hard to see at first - Lucas is a quickly sketched-in character, done by impressionistic strokes, so any changes would be hard to see. Yet his family can hear the surprised tone in his voice, and they can see a look of incomprehension and resentment on his face.

After the war, Lucas drives a truck for a gravel company, becomes a foreman for a lumberyard and is mysteriously gone for days at a time. His wife and little girl live in rented housing in Port Oriskany, where they wait for him.

Then in August 1977, a warrant is issued for his arrest. Wanted in connection with the murder of a drug dealer, Lucas begins a life in hiding. He leaves his wife and daughter to fend for themselves amid the grime, poverty and alcohol and drug abuse of Port Oriskany.

His absence gives rise to the title, ``Man Crazy,'' Oates' 27th novel. It also suggests the novel's theme that daughters raised without a father are full of need and easily hurt because of their need. They become boy-crazy and man-crazy. As Ingrid says in one of the few succinct sentences (several sentences run a page; many sentences contain 80 or so words racing on in a breathless, violent, ugly poetry) in the book, ``Crazy for men they say it's really your own daddy you seek.''

Being man-crazy, Ingrid finds her father, literally, for a short time when he returns to kill the man her mother is seeing. She also finds several father-substitutes; what happens because of these substitutes constitutes the plot of the book.

One of the substitutes is the psychiatrist to whom Ingrid tells the story of this depressing, dismal novel. The other important substitute is Enoch Skaggs, whose very name conjures up the image of this beefy biker, with his leather jacket, tattoos on his muscled arms, and with whom Ingrid falls in love. Leader of a satanic gang, Skaggs and his followers sexually abuse Ingrid during the book's final stomach-churning, almost unreadable chapters, changing her from her daddy's ``Doll-Girl'' to the gang's ``Dog-Girl.''

Yet there is a middle ground between the melancholy and the cheery. To the detriment of this novel, Oates seems to have forgotten such ground, making Port Oriskany a place where one would neither want to live or visit, in reality or in fiction. MEMO: Diane Scharper is a poet who teaches writing at Towson State

University outside Baltimore. Her next book, ``Songs of Myself,'' an

edited collection of memoirs by college students, will be published in

the spring. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

BOOK REVIEW

Title: ``Man Crazy''

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Publisher: Dutton. 282 pp.

Price: $23.95.