Joyce Carol Oates: The Tattooed Girl

A confession: until now, I had read not a single one of Oates' daunting assembly of 86 books. But this embarrassingly overdue introduction should change that.

The Tattooed Girl is a compelling, forcefully told portrait of a peculiar relationship between a reclusive academic, Joshua Seigl, and a strange girl who changes his life. Alma Busch, a doughy piece of rural white-trash with a smudgy tattoo under one eye and washed-out graffiti marks all over her body, drifts into Siegl's town, Carmel Heights.

Alma, trembling and spaced out, is a magnet for abuse. She is targeted by a malevolent junkie waiter called Dmitri, who becomes her lover, and her pimp.

Siegl notices Alma slumped in Dmitri's cafe during a chess match, where he regularly shows off his superior skills and capacity to relate to the ordinary man.

But Siegl, once famous for a youthful novel about the Holocaust and revered for his academic brilliance, has reached a crisis. He has reluctantly decided he needs a live-in assistant for his new project, a translation of Virgil's Aeneid.

The trouble is, the ascetic Siegl (actually only 38 years old) is repulsed by people. None of the applicants will do, until almost by accident, he decides Alma should be the subject of his benevolence. And so she moves in to sort his papers — even though she can barely read — and clean his huge house.

Unbeknown to Siegl, the literal-minded, seemingly stupid Alma has absorbed Dmitri's view that Siegl is a Jew, to be hated and harmed, while Siegl, patronising and self-obsessed, does not understand his new charge — or perhaps any other human being — at all.

Alma is a cunning creature, and gradually starts to eke out subtle punishments for Siegl, because he is a man and a Jew. But Siegl's body begins to fail him anyway, and during a bizarre argument about the Holocaust, Alma discovers he is a Presbyterian (this is not giving away a vital plot twist; Siegl's background is revealed early in the book). Now what will she do?

In Siegl and Alma, Oates has created two fantastically odd but authentic characters whose interaction is often comedic but more often blundering and sinister.

And then there is Siegl's sister Jet (formerly Mary Beth until she opted for a more dramatic persona), a terrifically defined manic demented by envy and vanity. All the while, as Siegl's friends and colleagues regard Alma with contempt, his live-in companion suffers growing rage.

Oates has described this work as a thriller, which it is. But within the space of its 300 cliche-free pages it touches on the Holocaust and those who deny it, the isolation of academic life, the destructiveness of sexual desire, and above all, the unpredictability of real love. It is a real gripper — and the ending entirely unexpected.

* Linda Herrick is the Herald arts editor

Published by: Harpercollins
Price: $24.99