 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
The Tattooed Girl
By Joyce Carol Oates
Fourth Estate
$29.95
 American writer Joyce Carol Oates falls into no easy category, having to her credit a host of plays, poems, novellas, short stories, essays and novels, including Blonde, based on the life of Marilyn Monroe.
The Tattooed Girl, an eerie read, is peopled by two of America's diverse social strata, rich Jewish intellectuals and white 'trailer trash', the former confused about relationships and troubled by their Holocaust history, the latter too busy with getting by - mostly on drugs - to indulge in self reflection.
Acclaimed writer and academic, Joshua Seigl, and Alma Busch (the 'tattooed girl' of the title) represent worlds that would not normally collide, unless, as happens here, one ends up working for the other. By the end of the novel, neither will be alive, and justice will certainly not have been done, but the reader will be captivated by the insights into two very different lifestyles.
After being spotted working a menial job in a bookshop, Alma accepts an offer to become Dr Seigl's personal assistant, wondering if it is not a veiled attempt to get into her pants: most men she meets, including her drug-dealing lover Dmitri, treat her as little more than an easy lay.
Soon, she realises Joshua is just a lonely, academic celebrity, perhaps ripe for exploitation by a good-looker from across the tracks.
'She could not have said it was Seigl's Jew-ness she hated... It was like trying to figure out why they'd tattooed her, the guys she'd trusted. Feeding her vodka and some kind of meth? crystal? She'd never know and what the **** difference did it make she was ****ing grateful to wake up afterward, O Christ.'
Deeply resentful of her employer's wealth, she can only explain the injustice of it all by characterising him as a Jew.
Yet, as Seigl reveals, he is not.
'What had Seigl said: his mother was a Gentile? Not a Jew? To be Jewish you had to have a Jewish mother... She thought, A man who plays at being a Jew is worse than any Jew.'
Before Alma accepts a room at Seigl's house, Dmitri and his dropkick friends decide they might benefit from her position, which might even lead to marriage, and she utters words that will come back to haunt her, speculating that killing him might be the best strategy.
As it happens, Alma is the one to get killed, while Joshua dies of an accident resulting from his degenerative nerve disorder, adding yet another layer to this eerie, captivating tale.
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