“Babysitter “ by Joyce Carol Oates

 “Babysitter“ by Joyce Carol Oates:

This novel is a tale of violence and abuse of the most vulnerable, children and women, committed by cruel, dominating men. 

It is 1977, Detroit and the city is still recovering from the race riots a decade earlier but experiencing the first signs of urban gentrification. A series of brutal child murders by a perpetrator known as Babysitter hits, shocks and terrorizes the citizens. Babysitter leaves his victims lying naked, washed and groomed, on the ground, their clothes neatly folded beside them. 

In stark contrast and in a parallel story-line but serving as the main engine of the plot is the story of Hannah, a Dior-clad 39-year-old housewife, rich, with two little kids and a husband who is not aware of her anymore, living a secluded, boring life in which every day is a white blank that needs to be filled with activity, any activity. She is profoundly doubting herself, is deeply uncertain, despite her arresting beauty, about the reality of her social being. She embarks on a dangerous, devastating affair with a mysterious man known only by the initials YK. Even after YK rapes her in the most cruel and demeaning fashion, almost killing her in the event, Hannah, starved for love as she is, keeps thinking of him as her lover with tenderness. Hannah is victimized but, quite bafflingly also cooperates in her own victimization. “Only the weak fall in love, they see no way of living otherwise”. This is a fair summarization of the desires that drive Hannah in this disturbing novel. 

The narrative timeline twists back and forth and for much of the novel Hannah’s daydreams keep returning again and again to the sensation of YK touching her wrist at their initial meeting or her first ascent in the glass capsule of a hotel elevator which took her towards their first meeting. 

Interwoven throughout the narrative are simmering racial and class tensions. The wealthy white class citizens feeling threatened by the black populace of poorer Detroit, the Filipina household help who is constantly there, caring for the family, but never registered as part of it. 

This is a compelling, unsettling study of the most ugly aspects of human desire. It is dark, violent and a tense examination of gender and power. 

In the end, even though Oates is, as she is so often, brilliant in her writing, it proved to be unsatisfactory for me, I just couldn’t go the way Oates wanted me to go and believe that a woman like Hannah would be so foolish to not see the risk that lies in such a reckless, dangerous affair, with all the signs of “turn back” on glaringly red, and still go on, risk her and her family’s existence just because she was restless and sexually unfulfilled. 

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