Joyce Carol Oates must be a tough woman. From the snippets of what I know of her life, she has endured hardship but a line floored me in her short story, "The First Husband":
"Food is eros without the risk of heartbreak. Unlike a lover, food will never reject you."
I assumed that Oates wrote the story when she was young but evidence suggests otherwise. It was published in 2008 when she was 70.
Sadly, I must report that food can indeed reject you. It can reject you with greater force and violence than Aeneas did Dido, than Anna Karenina did Alexey, than O.J. Simpson did Nicole. Maybe you have to be 340 pounds like I was or maybe you need to have such a terrible reaction to radiation therapy that your colonoscopy results look like an old fire hose blasted by buck shot, but, yes, food can definitely reject you.
With those disturbing images in place, I'm set to review "The First Husband."
A tax attorney, searching for his wife's missing passport, discovers old pictures of her with her attractive first husband. The attorney is perturbed--his wife had told him that she'd thrown out all the first husband's pictures.
This snowballs to a loss of his job and marriage until he is off to a cross-country trip for murder.
This could have been written as a comedy or horror. On the surface, it's similar to Poe's "The Black Cat," but it's much more grounded in literary realism. I wrote bedore that some of Oates' material straddles literary fiction and horror but "The First Husband" feels 75٪ over the line for literary.
The strength of story is that it reflects how bad blood can develop in long-term relationships. Something that wouldn't even register to a couple who just started dating might build up to a disaster to a married couple of many years. Usually not ending quite so severe.
I ended that last paragraph with a sentence fragment to segue into my next point--Oates loves comma splices and other types of creative grammar. As with the mega paragraph of "Split/Brains," normally this would bother me but maybe it's that Oates writes with enough authority that she gets away with it.
Horror fans should probably look elsewhere but "The First Husband" is a disturbing look at a life that spirals into destruction.
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