Finished up 'The Tattooed Girl' by Joyce Carol Oates last night. As a rule I tend to avoid books that list their title and then have a colon and the words "A novel" afterwards. If the target readers aren't going to be able to figure out it is a novel without help from the title, I figure that it can't be all that good. I made the rare exception with this book, because I enjoyed 'We Were the Mulvaneys' by Oates and this looked like it might be decent.

I think I could be a character in a Joyce Carol Oates book. I sort of resemble Joshua Seigl, the male lead in this one. Joshua is an eccentric, bright single man around the same age I am. Joshua is Jewish, a famous writer and the heir to millions, but I can recognize myself in some of his mannerisms. I have a similiar self-deprecating style and I'm sort of absent-minded.

The female main character, the tattooed girl of the title, is also somewhat familiar to me. At some point in the past, a group of men held her against her will and covered her body with a crude, blotchy tattoo. She is a poor, uneducated woman who has been involved in a series of abusive relationships, her most recent one with a man who drugged her and made her work as a prostitute. This week, a not unusual week for me and only half over, I have already dealt with one individual with a harsher past. I was going to say two individuals, but I'm not as clear enough on the details of the second one to say that it was worse.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Joshua hires the tattooed girl as his personal assistant and becomes increasingly dependent upon her due to a debilitating neurological disorder. The tattooed girl, used to being abused and mistreated, secretly despises her employer, steals small items from his house and puts things in his food. Eventually, they grow closer to one another.

The tattooed girl and Joshua live in the same house but inhabit two different worlds. Both are ignorant of each other's lives. Joshua thinks that the tattoos are birthmarks, and hasn't the slightest comprehension of the tattooed girl's history or her private life. On the other hand, the tattooed girl is only semi-literate and has been taught a vicious and ignorant anti-semitism by her boyfriend. Although Joshua is very attracted to the tattooed girl, differences in class and background make it impossible for him to contemplate a relationship with her. On the other hand, the tattooed girl has a disdain for the way Joshua spends money like it is water. She sees the abusive manner in which others in her life treat her as their way of recognizing her as a person. For her, Joshua's absentminded kindness is a form of weakness and a sign of how he views her as less than a person.

Both characters are prone to act without really understanding why they act. For a brief period, Joshua's neurological disorder goes into remission and he enters a manic, euphoric state. The remission ends, and after a bad visit with his doctor, he tells the tattooed girl that he is disgusted with her chewing gum, not recognizing that he is venting because of his frustation over his physical state. One evening, the tattooed girl crushes a glass and puts it in the casserole she is serving. Then she spills it on Joshua and afterwards eats part of it herself.

'The Tattooed Girl' contains a subtle discourse on the holocaust. Joshua is famous for a book he wrote on the concentration camps, and the tattoos on his employee are linked to the numbers stitched into the skin of the victims of Auschwitz and Dachau. Joshua may be the child of a concentration camp survivor, but the book suggests that the tattooed girl is more the proper heir to that legacy.

I really enjoyed this book. This is the first work by Oates that I have been able to finish since 'We Were the Mulvaneys'. I feel like I have connections to both of the worlds the main characters inhabit. It was a depressing book though, and it has infected my work and personal life for the last few days.