Babysitter

This, for me, is the best thing that JCO has written in the last few years. It's a complex text that jumps seamlessly through the inner consciousness of various characters, into 3rd person omniscient and back out again. That this is done so fluidly without jarring moments for the reader is already impressive and, combined with the hard-hitting contents that JCO forces us not to look away from, this is quite the tour de force.

Set in Detroit in 1977 (but really set anywhere ruled by patriarchy, racial hierarchies and capitalism), JCO somehow manages to draw comparisons between all kinds of powers and states of oppression: from child abuse to sexual predators, from the authorities assigned to wealth and race to gendered asymmetries and the domestic assumptions, not least motherhood, with which women are burdened.

At the heart of the book is Hannah, a late thirties, wealthy (well, she's married to a rich husband) wife and mother with nothing to do with her time other than sit on benevolent charitable committees with other ladies-who-lunch - she has a live-in nanny (Hannah's not completely sure whether her brown skin is from the Philippines or somewhere from Latin America), she's dressed in designer clothes from her cashmere coats to her YSL snakeskin shoes and her Prada bag (natch!) and if her husband doesn't pay attention to her, well, that's natural in a ten year marriage... isn't it?

What kickstarts Hannah's crisis is the touch of a strange man's hand on her wrist at a gala dinner - and soon her life is terrifyingly off the rails. That this is not just a personal calamity for Hannah is made clear through JCO's setting of her story against the reign of a serial killer who abducts children, primarily boys.

There's so much woven together here: the sterile life of women stripped of any kind of social authorisation other than motherhood; the desperate neediness and desire to be loved that is society's way of containing and holding out rewards to women; violence and brutality, sexual and otherwise; with an omniscient social commentary from now especially on race, the (false) criminalisation of Black men, money, and the power of guns.

Stylistically, not everyone will, I think, respond to JCO's prose: it's iterative and creatively intuitive, sections are hypnotic and hallucinogenic, and sometimes the narrative splits so that there are alternatives captured and held together as alternatives to a single route. I loved it as we flip backwards and forwards and the story itself becomes one that we piece together in collaboration with author and text.

Beware: JCO is bold in her vision and brutal in what she allows to be on the page. A powerful, sometimes terrifying, book - and yes, the best thing she's written in years.

If this is your first Joyce Carol Oates book, you're in for a baptism of fire. Oates has a unique, distinctive writing style. It took me a few pages to acclimatise to 'Babysitter' but I was drawn in very quickly. It's as morbidly fascinating as it is repulsive. The story is presented in four parts, though I'm not entirely sure why. It's a disorientating read. The 1977 setting feels incongruous with the actual narrative. It's a frustrating book because so much is left unexplained. The beginning dragged out and the ending was abrupt. I feel exactly the same way about this as I did about the last Joyce Carol Oates book I read, which is I've absolutely no idea what I think or feel about it. 'Babysitter' is the sort of literary fiction that leaves you feeling that you must be too stupid to understand it. Having said all of that, it burrows into your brain like an intrusive thought. If you think this review doesn't make sense, wait till you read the book!