The protagonist, Joshua Seigl, is a take-off on Philip Roth, and to ensure the readers’ apprehension of this, she dedicates the book to him. Clever—in the first couple of pages I was chuckling—cruel, mean spirited—soon reading was as uncomfortable as watching a bare-knuckled fist fight.
The novel focuses on the time in Seigl’s life when he was struck down (literally) with a mysterious, devastating illness. Readers of Philip Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson will feel twinges of recognition.
The title character, Alma, affords no relief. In the novel’s early pages she is a victim, has been a victim--of among other cruelties S & M exploitation--seems assured a future of victimhood. Her victimization has been inscribed on her once-pretty face, arms, and hands with tattoos. Don’t imagine the tattoos you’ve seen on fresh faced youths or even the black ink tattoos so frequent in prison life. Alma’s tattoos are not even doodles but gray scribbles meant to deface. Who put them there and why? She doesn’t know, but they have changed her life, marking her as something to be used, not someone to cherish. What becomes of her is full of surprises and well demonstrates the complexity and flexibility of the human personality.
Two important third-level characters, Dimitri Meatte and Jet—Seigl’s sister—are both vicious in different ways.
Sondra Bloomenthal, Seigl’s long-time friend and occasional lover is the novel’s most comfortable character, but can you
be comfortable in the presence of such an ever-hopeful glutton for rejection as this refined and well educated lady?
Oates has a clear eye and deft ways of describing the labyrinth-like complexity of the human brain, which notoriously at times is dominated by its intellectual circuitry only to be overwhelmed by the older reptilian synapses. Reading about these characters in action is much like reading about spiders—fascinating but horrid.
Eithne Farry quotes Oates as acknowledging, “Well, you know, The Tattooed Girl has a background of a Greek tragedy—there are lots of allusions to Greek literature.” Her characters do seem to me as extreme in the behavior and personality as those populating Greek tragedy. Farry also says that “For Oates, Alma—the girl of the title—is ‘an American type.’” Perhaps one among thousands of American types, but I would dispute her being in any way typical of Americans.
According to Farry Oates reports this novel is “about anti-Semitism and identity.” Certainly Alma and Dimitri are anti-Semitic:
Hate hate hate him: the Jew.
She could not have said it was Mr. Seigl’s Jew-ness she hated, or hating him, and knowing he was a Jew, that was why. Which came first. Maybe she’d never have guessed he was a Jew except Dimitri made so much of it. (She’d never have guessed his sister “Jet” was any Jew for sure.) Or maybe it was instinct? Something you could smell almost.
But I didn’t gain any new insight into anti-Semitism from reading The Tattooed Girl, more a recreation of attitudes and emotions I’d already encountered in too many acquaintances.
And identity? Well, Seigle certainly struggles with himself, as a man, as a writer, as an invalid, the most telling assault to his preferred persona being his abrupt, unexpected fall in a cemetery which let him for a time alone and helpless, and which seemed to hover, threatening and impeding his days:
And the symptoms from which he did suffer had so far been sporadic, unpredictable. He protested, “I can go for days without….”
Stumbling, falling. Mis-stepping
On good days he walked, hiked, jogged (cautiously). A good day had come to be a kind of (secret) holiday.
(For Seigl, desperate not to be found out, just yet, by the community, still more by his relatives, had become inordinately secretive. He’d never shared secrets readily, kept his private life private, but now he was becoming parenthetical: he felt like an eclipsed moon. He was still there, but you couldn’t see him.)
Every man ought to make his life acceptable to others, but his death to himself alone. Seigl leafed though volume four of the Epistles. His hands shook, but he could disguise it by resting the heavy book against a shelf.
He was breathing quickly. His face felt smudged, after his encounter with the woman. (But why so irritable with her, why so arrogant. She meant only well. She likes you, why react as if she wanted to sink her talons into your flesh like a harpy? There are no harpies in Carmel Heights.)
Fifteen days since that humiliating incident in the cemetery. Since that time Seigl’s entire sense of himself had changed. He felt every molecule had changed. There was matter and anti-matter in the universe, and he’d taken for granted that, being an American born in 1964 of well-to-do parents, he was matter, and he mattered. Now, he understood that he was becoming anti-matter. Death rising up his legs like the cold that rose in Socrates’ legs. In Mount Carmel Cemetery, Siegl had tasted that cold.
Not phrased, perhaps, so fancifully, aren’t these feeling similar to those of every seriously ill person? In illness, one’s identify does change to victim. But these are feelings and attitudes which, given recovery, disappear like collapsing fog. To dramatize it scarcely investigates or characterizes it.
The ending is, as befits a Greek tragedy look-alike, dramatic and surprising.
I wouldn’t recommend reading this novel for pleasure, but for insight into one of Oates’ personalities and into a real, though, distasteful behavioral mode of Homo sapiens, it is vividly illustrative.
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