New Yorker Fiction Review #313: "The Frenzy" by Joyce Carol Oates
Every time I read a short story by Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker I ask myself: "Why am I not reading JCO all the damn time??" She is so good she makes me want to start writing fiction again. Anyone who is looking to write fiction needs to stop what they're reading and read anything by this woman. I'm serious.
Part of the problem might just be that there's so much of her writing out there. Since she started publishing back in the 1960s she has published something like 58 (maybe more?) novels as has to her credit a list of short story publications that would make anyone who has ever tried to get even one short story published weep with envy. But the simple fact is: where do you start? For me, the answer has always lain in the pages of The New Yorker.
The short story at hand -- "The Frenzy" -- about a middle-aged man and his 19-year-old mistress who take a hasty, tense, winter road trip to coastal New Jersey, is not a "great" short story. It does not have grand, wide-ranging implications. It will not be passed around the internet, nor will it probably even be referenced among Joyce Carol Oates's best stories. It is, however, really good short story, rich with multiple layers of meaning to be interpreted, and a demonstration of Oates's supernatural gift for creating characters and putting them in awkward life situations that -- although sometimes even mundane-seeming -- always manage to surprise.
So, what happens when Cassidy, a bored, 46-year-old Manhattan family man, begins an affair with Brianna, the troubled, 19-year-old daughter of a family friend, and the pair, ten days before Christmas, take a surreptitious road trip to Cape May, New Jersey? Well, it goes about as well as you might expect.
Cassidy has a daughter that is Brianna's age. In fact, Brianna and Cassidy's daughter went to high school together. That's how he knows her. This, right off the bat, is a level of queasiness that needs to be acknowledged and is palpable almost immediately within the context of the story. If Brianna could be said to have "Daddy issues," then Cassidy may have some "daughter issues," or at the least "parent issues."
As the two drive together down the coast of New Jersey, it is quickly evident there is a parent-child type of relationship between them, including all of the attendant frustrations parents have with their children and including the sort of watchful, authoritative, protecting instincts as well.
"Does Cassidy miss being a daddy--a daddy to small children? The overseer of so much emotion, a puppet master with weary arms?"
I have said again and again that a great short story will often give you the keys to understanding it somewhere within its paragraphs. A line like the line above is, without at doubt, one of the keys to understanding this short story. Fortunately, in the hands of a great author like Oates, you get a few such pithy lines like this which lead you to deduce a broader "meaning" to the story, but she never spoon feeds it to you.
Much later in the story, when Cassidy thinks about the possibility of being caught in his infidelity:
"For he could not bear being considered selfish, cruel, a bad daddy. He has simply lost his ability to impersonate himself, the way over time you can lose a skill like piano playing or speaking a language."
While by no means a justification for cheating on your spouse with someone your kid went to high school with, that certainly describes a way almost all of us feel at times. Who among us has not felt tired of having to uphold our own vision of ourselves, a vision which is -- of course, no matter how much we want to admit it -- ultimately how we see ourselves through the eyes of others.
What is clear is that Cassidy and Brianna are not really having an affair with each other, at least, it is not an emotional affair. Brianna is a distracted, willful, impulsive, teenager with some substance abuse issues. Cassidy is a middle-aged man who is channeling his sadness and existential angst at the mundanity of life -- the one he chose -- into a dalliance with someone less than half his age and less than half his emotional capacity. For a brief moment it makes him feel young and virile again, but the results prove to be disastrous, if not catastrophic (we don't get to see the full aftermath).
There is at least (at least) one other plane on which to understand this story. The story's title refers back to a memory Cassidy had of witnessing a feeding frenzy in the Atlantic Ocean during a boat tour he took long ago before he was even married. The sight of the fish all wildly and frantically feeding on each other -- the small fish feeding on plankton, the bigger fish feeding on the small fish, the even bigger fish feeding on those fish, etc. -- simultaneously disgusts and entrances Cassidy.
How do we connect that to a possible "meaning" of this story? It's clear that Cassidy's affair with Brianna is not something undertaken with precision and planning. It's not even something being undertaken out of passion, as it's clear he and Brianna have hardly any emotional connection. It is, rather, the opportunistic grabbing of what has drifted right in front of him. Asked "why" he started the affair, we could see Cassidy blankly responding: "Because I could."
Thus, I believe Oates is drawing some kind of connection between the feeding frenzy -- especially the big fish / small fish metaphor, which could be applied to the character's age and emotional maturity levels -- and some sort of mid-life crisis rashness within Cassidy that needed, and found, an escape valve.
Brianna herself is a fascinating character who while perhaps not outwardly a match for Cassidy, is not a victim or a "babe in the woods." She may be not know how to articulate her emotions well and she may be erratic in her behavior and attention, but she is not powerless, as we see later in the story.
Photograph by Noah Wall.
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