The Accursed is a great American novel. I disagree with those who say it’s “not one of Oates’s best”: I found it compelling, amusing, thought provoking, hard to put down; and when it was over, I wished there’d been more—but I guess it can’t appeal to every reader. For one thing, it’s been pigeon-holed as a “historical novel” when it doesn’t really fit that genre—or any other: it seems intended to trample and confound the genres: it’s a horror story but never a thriller; it’s got demons but isn’t a “fantasy”; it’s a multi-layered comedy—but the jokes are too sad for laughter; it’s a psychological mystery wrapped in a futile political struggle, wrapped in discouraging historical vignettes; and in the end, these elements all come together to point the accusing finger at 21st century American hypocrisy.
Plus, it’s a Modern gothic—“Modern” in the sense that Oates employs the “mask” of a limited-perspective narrator, whose voice and sensibilities are clearly not her own and who, despite his chronological remove from the plotline and despite his careful “objectivity,” must be seen as one of the novel’s main characters—for his prim remove can obscure as much as it illuminates (the reader, then, must judge independently of him: the historian is part of the problem, you see, when we try to apprehend the past—it’s a Schrodinger’s cat thing); and “gothic” in the sense that The Accursed takes form and tone from such 18th and 19th century megaliths as Melmoth the Wanderer and The Monk—which means it’s, slow, episodic, often other-worldly, and always coiling with sexual tension.
And yet I think The Accursed is mostly a comedy. It’s certainly ”comedy” in the classical sense; and most of Oates’s historical portraits are caricatures; and at times The Accursed is even a farce: she names one of her prominent male characters “Pearce van Dyck”—which, obviously, could be the name of a campy male porn-star. This Pearce van Dyck is far from a stud—in fact, he’s a hyper-intellectual prude—but he vents his frustrations in such metaphors as: “If only I could PENETRATE this forest of clues” (emphasis added). If that sort of concatenation is up your alley, then The Accursed is probably for you.
In any case, it’s not a “historical novel.” Yes, Oates has set it in a certain place (Princeton, NJ) and at a specific time: just between the Spanish American and First World Wars. And some of the events it depicts presumably “really happened”; and Upton Sinclair and Woodrow Wilson both play major roles, and numerous other celebs of that day—Jack London, Sam Clemens, Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt—even “Sherlock Holmes”—all make key, cameo appearances. However, The Accursed is not “about” them: Oates doesn’t show us, for instance, the “turning point” in any of their careers, nor do we see them develop here in novelistic ways. Rather, they all (except Wilson) have already attained their full celebrity, prior to the novel’s first chapter; and they now all seem largely stuck in ruts and incapable of, for instance, epiphany. In short, Oates is just using them all: they’re elements of the verisimilitude and, more importantly, they’re all poster boys: each represents a particular, historically valid male attitude.
Upton Sinclair, for instance, is here to represent those Americans who, just prior to the First World War, believed in and diligently worked toward American Socialist Revolution. While Oates could have invented a fictional character to represent all that, we, with our biases and easy hindsight, might have thought such a character naïve or passé. By instead indentifying American Socialism with a “personage”—an “Upton Sinclair”’—Oates effectively removes it from the realm of fiction and places it where it of course belongs, in the realm of facts. This effectively limits the reader’s ability to make one of easy, pre-polarized modern judgments about it, and that enables Oates to conjure up the ghosts of American Socialism in a way that we today can still find sincere and optimistic. In the same way, Oates uses Woodrow Wilson to represent an upper class, Protestant, establishmentarian worldview that we, today, might mistake for shallow satire, where it not housed within the stolid, “real life” Wilson.
The effect of it all is the reader can more easily imagine some of the novel’s “other” characters might also have once been “real,” and, further, that some of the novel’s more incredible events—those which comprise the “Curse” in its title—might have somehow “really happened.” Historicity, in short, becomes a solid platform from which Oates can boldly unleash a swarm of ghosts, demons, precognitive visions, mass hallucinations, and probative questions of “sanity.” Oh, and a resurrection of the dead, as well. Had she simply injected those otherworldly elements straight into our modern-day America, Oates might have given us just one more helping of dreary, Post-modern escapism. By grounding the fantasy in an “Age of Spiritualism” and by using historicity as kind of a “filter” on the reader’s perceptions, Oates has instead built a shimmering kaleidoscope.
At the risk of including a few minor SPOILERS, I should sketch the major themes: the world that Oates depicts in The Accursed is one in which biology is destiny: the men lord it over the women; and most of the men are in turn oppressed by their yearnings for power and influence. These men’s struggles are abetted by—rather than being mitigated by—their rationalistic grasping at religious or philosophical straws. Through their base contentions, Oates develops two opposing worldviews: one we can call a “liberal” or “Socialist” view, the other a “conservative” or “Protestant” view. The Accursed is, in particular, concerned with the consequences for a society—and for the individuals comprising it—of sexual suppression and gender-based oppression. The novel is set at a time when Western women were marching in the streets for suffrage. The male character Pearce Van Dyck believes there are “more urgent matters” than women’s rights—“The ‘problem of evil,’ for one,” he says—but, as noted above, van Dyck’s conception of evil is rooted in the flesh. That makes his problem, in essence, that life proceeds ONLY by way of the flesh, which makes his assertion that “nothing can be done in any of our lives until… the Curse… is lifted” nothing less than the ultimate irony: only death can deliver the freedom that Pearce imagines we need. And meanwhile, a female character confides to her diary, “Is the terrible secret of the Curse—that it surrounds us & nourishes us?” And she, of course, is right. In the end, the two opposing “Idealisms” collapse in disturbingly similar ways: the “liberal” view hits a realization that “this world is sullied almost beyond redemption in hypocrisy, lies, and outright evil. Even Socialism… is tainted…” while the Puritanical view melt-downs with a rant that includes: “THE LORD OF HOSTS… HAS FORGED A COVENANT TO DISGUISE THE WORKINGS OF EVIL…IN THIS WAY TO PROMOTE EVIL….” Thus, neither side can possibly win the fundamental argument; and we in the “real world” are, by extension to parable, cursed as well: our real-world Conservatives are doomed by a prurient prudery that drives them mad; and our Liberals are doomed because a pop star’s sensuality is finally solipsistic and self-destructive. Even so, at novel’s end, the door may yet be open for a few brave, conscientious souls to try to find a way forward—although, what’s needed, evidently, is a sea change to our concepts of “self” and “society.” What’s needed, evidently, is a sudden divorce from our comforting web of conventions and grand delusions. So, if you think this novel’s about the past and not our present, think again!
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