I'll Take You There [Paperback]

This novel is brewing with complex ideas all delicately arranged around an intricate plot. The sections of the novel could stand quite independently from each other. But together they draw an intriguing picture of Anellia's development and her discovery of the woman she wants to become. The frame she has set around her life is designed to mollify her qualms with existence but it is also a trap that limits the freedom of her individuality. The language she composes to liberate herself is also an unbearable burden. This is revealed in the telling line: "In fear I seemed to be plucking at, with childish fingers, a consolation of philosophy." Anellia's relationship with Vernor is akin to an artist gazing upon her muse, drawing inspiration and guidance to create an artwork, an identity for herself. Unhesitating in her confrontation of the troubles of racial relations as Oates always is, the denial of the language which defines Vernor's color provokes the collapse of any true connection between them. This, paired with Vernor's own inability to divert from the path he has limited himself to, makes their coupling wildly antagonistic and dangerous.

It is significant that Oates has dedicated this novel to Gloria Vanderbilt, the visual artist, on who's work Oates has written: "It may be that Dream Boxes represent an elliptical, subversive reclaiming of identity by one who has, unlike most of us, been over-defined - `over-determined' in psychoanalytical terms-by the exterior world." Anellia is also unique and this confession to an unknown companion is her psychological triptych. Engagingly emotional and philosophical, I'll Take You There is a deep study of a difficult climb to adulthood. Its artful composition produces a compelling novel. It is a skillful accomplishment that can be enjoyed by both the passionate thinking and the romantic reader.

"I'll Take You There" is a tightly circumscribed, claustraphobic novel, exploring the psychological journey - I really hate that empty blurb-ish phrase, but it's applicable here - of a gifted, vaguely disturbed young woman in the 1950s. The nameless narrator who occasionally goes by the name of "Anellia" is an deeply idiosyncratic yet sympathetic creation. In the hands of a lesser writer, much of her painful passage to womanhood could be a little cliche, but Oates is expert at walking the tight-rope between the odd and the ordinary, the familiar and the alien; we feel like we've met Oates' characters before, and yet we also know we haven't.

As always with Oates, I find she is a brilliant but uneven stylist. Most of her books - the flawless "Foxfire" being the exception - have some long lifeless sections and some unbearably over-written passages, as well as stretches of truly exhilerating prose. ("Blonde" embodies this unevenness.) Like most readers, I don't read in order to hunt for jewelled phrases, but when you've struck upon one of Oates' truly hypnotic passages, you can't help but feel a little in awe, a little breathless - to borrow another blurby phrase - and you're momentarily filled with the conviction that she's a genius. "I'll Take You There" has such passages, and it's worth reading the whole book just to savour the fascinating middle section, in which Anellia enters into a bleak and consuming relationship with a black philosophy student who turns out to be far more damaged than she is. The first and last sections - in which Anellia enters a sorority and seeks to mend her relationship with her father - are good but never quite as riveting.

While, as a coming of age novel, it seems natural that "I'll Take You There" has a limited trajectory, I can't help but feel that Oates has confined herself here and limited the extent of her own powers to some degree. As with so many of her novels, there's a great novel buried in here somewhere, but instead, she's merely written another good one. As always, her brilliance seems somehow dispersed across her books rather than concentrated in a single great novel.

That said, what Oates must produce on a lazy afternoon is worth any number of other works by most of her contemporaries.