Joyce Carol Oates enters 'tabloid hell'

"My Sister, My Love"

By Joyce Carol Oates

Ecco

562 pages, $25.95

Some of Oates' books feel as if she wrote them as dares to herself. This novel, her 37th, is one of the wildest.

Oates sets out to solve a fictionalized version of the JonBenet Ramsey murder, with skating prodigy "Bliss" Rampike replacing the real-life child beauty pageant contestant. The resolution she imagines is heartrending, grotesque and totally believable.

It's also only the second-best thing about the book.

What's most impressive about the story is that Oates unravels the murder mystery from the perspective of one of the least reliable narrators imaginable. Nineteen-year-old Skyler Rampike, Bliss' older brother, is so shaky in his memories that he can't say for sure he didn't kill his sister. Lonely, disturbed and a self-described ex-junkie, Skyler both attracts and repels.

Unreliable and occasionally unpleasant narrators are among the greatest challenges for writers and readers alike, and Oates has a captivating ability to keep us turning pages even when we wish we could leave Skyler alone in the infamy he calls "tabloid hell."

For all Skyler's flaws - Oates takes her time revealing their extent - he writes beautifully. Maybe too beautifully.

His voice shifts from stream of consciousness to a kind of formal detachment reminiscent of Vladimir Nabakov's "The Eye." (An appropriate allusion, if it's intentional, since Nabakov is the master of unreliable and distancing narrators.)

One can quibble with Oates' decision to let Skyler occasionally write as well as she does. How many troubled teenagers could compose so fine a sentence as this?

"For when you practice each day, as many as two hours each day, and when you are attempting new, ever more difficult maneuvers, naturally you will falter sometimes, and you will slip sometimes, and fall hard."

The way to handle broken narrators, perhaps, is to try to find poetry in their plain speech. But Oates has already done that - her "Zombie" is a brilliant exercise in the art of the seemingly unedited confessional.

With "My Sister, My Love," she attempts a new, ever more difficult maneuver: a literary memoir, obsessively footnoted and partly vetted by some unseen editor. Perhaps 100 pages longer than it needs to be, and filled with Skyler's misinterpretations, it feels like a rough draft that leaves the narrator overexposed - just as Oates seems to intend.

The recent announcement that Colorado prosecutors have cleared the entire Ramsey family in JonBenet's death does nothing to take away from the drama of Oates' version of the crime, and the conflicted narration is part of the reason.

The story is as much about Skyler discovering himself, through writing, as it is about discovering his sister's killer. Which makes it all the more impressive that the big reveal happens to be devastating.

Oates offers a series of plausible suspects, including the children's parents: college athlete-turned-executive blowhard "Bix" Rampike, and Betsey Rampike, who sees Bliss' magic on the ice as a way to gain fame, the respect of her snobby neighbors and the love of her distant husband.

Also suspect is the Rampike's entire value system. They live in one of those easily satirized towns where children take as many prescription drugs as their parents and elementary schoolers are placed in Ivy League prep courses.

The book's only real weakness is how many pages Skyler - or Oates - devotes to tearing down such targets. She's too good at the big challenges to waste time on such easy ones.