The perfect little girl by Joyce Carol Oates – Corriere.it

When her brother asks for the doll’s name, Bliss replies that it’s a secret. Skyler insists, until Bliss gives in: «Edna Louise” He says. She is an old doll as big as the owner, the special child, the prodigy, the perfect daughter of Bix and Betsey Rampike: Bliss Rampike, ice skating queen. But Bliss is not her baptismal name, Bliss (Blessing) is the name assigned to her by her mother following an apparition bearing a message from God: call her Bliss, she will be your blessing. No longer Edna Louise, like her paternal grandmother, like an ordinary child.

So the old doll, with the girl’s first name, keeps the owner’s soul, more: what has been taken away from her. Why a lot has been taken from her, like all the girls/girls of Oates. Not just childhood. The lost is great, and precedes the misdeed.

So in Blonde, Marilyn Monroe little girl is not separated from the doll escaped the fire with her. But while Norma Jeane is unharmed, the doll is damaged, and those marks mean the inner signs of Norma Jeane, the hidden wounds (again the concept of a real soul hidden in the doll). Dolls as self-projections, prefiguration of the future. Dolls and even children as other declinations of the protagonist. That’s who Skyler is – the failed version of Bliss. Narrator, witness — failed hero. I happen to live.

There was a time when only he existed in the Rampike family, when Bliss was yet to be born, and it was Skyler who was the promise of redemption. A time when the attentions of mother Rampike were for him, the son. At that time, in the account of those days before Bliss, three years, Skyler shines, rises (literally: on the rings of the gym), swings, collapses.

Through him Oates shows the wrong result of the maternal project, the failure that takes shape in Skyler, who – due to the fall – will remain forever lame (bruised like the doll).
Skyler is a flawed representation of Bliss, the previous result turned out badly. And after: what remains of Bliss, the remains of the special child.
To this extent Skyler is Bliss, and therefore always the protagonist, although he himself puts himself in the background, in the footnotes: not only did his parents push him into a corner (in the Christmas photo, in the videos, directly cut in the photos in which it came badly to leave only Bliss).

The immediate provision has turned into second nature: the child then a boy puts himself in the corner. In Sister, my only love the crush is of all children: every child who appears in the novel, friend, schoolmate, succumbs to the adult system which erases him in various ways, often diagnosed with disease — incipient dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive syndrome, autism spectrum, personality disorder, acute premature depression. Dozens of ailments, as if childhood were the real fault to be repaired.

Released in America in 2008, Sister, my only love era the exact radiograph of American society, not yet from Italy (where it comes out in 2009). Fifteen years later it also affects us very closely: in the cataloging of childhood disorders, in early diagnoses, in cognitive tests, in psychopharmaceuticals prescribed to children.

Oates doesn’t just talk about America. His is not the mere unmasking of the American dream as a hoax. In his books, the unrealizable utopia coincides with the impossibility of a long youth. Oates’ entire oeuvre is populated with children crushed by adults. Children animated by the desire to grow up against “looming adults”.

Sometimes these adults are the Kennedys (Ted Kennedy in Black waterJohn Kennedy at Blonde). The family that most contributed to the American illusion.
And the children? Who are the children?
Born of flesh, made into puppets — Reverse Pinocchio. And if Pinocchio turns into a child while living, Bliss, Skyler and the others are reduced to puppets by the will of the adults. If Pinocchio runs away, he disobeys, he seems to have learned his lesson, but no: here he is repeating his mistake – Bliss obeys. While Pinocchio bruises himself, tears his clothes, ruining the original construction, Bliss is built: lightened hair, electro-depilation to raise the forehead, false nails, false teeth. Pinocchio becomes flesh the moment he detaches himself from his father’s aspiration, vice versa Bliss, as he approaches his mother’s, dies.

However, there is a difference between Geppetto’s intention and Betsey Rampike’s.
Geppetto makes the puppet based on an abstract concept, Betsey models her daughter on an idealization.
In searching for his identity, Pinocchio departs from Geppetto’s model. Growing up means trying to find a form by trial and error, and the good form turns out to be far from the father’s project and above all far from the spontaneous, rebellious form that is the puppet at the beginning of the story. The child is at the moment when he discovers something else even by himself: when, having to get out of the belly of the whale, Geppetto confesses that he cannot swim. It is exactly in this instant, in the exchange of roles and weights, that the puppet is already a human being.

“Do you think it possible that a puppet, barely a meter tall, like you, could have enough strength to carry me swimming on his shoulders?” doubts Geppetto.
And Pinocchio, the new Pinocchio: «Get on my shoulders and hug me tightly. I’ll take care of the rest.”

Inspired by a news story (the murder of little JonBenét Ramsey, beauty queen), Sister, my only love it does not tell the crime itself. Oates does not reconstruct the murder, but the ambition of middle class American to excel — directly, or through a third party through the children.
Oates therefore reconstructs a social class together with a hierarchical apparatus of power and success that generates frustration/happiness. In both cases, brief: brief frustration, brief happiness.

Before arriving at the tragedy, the writer talks about the family. And in this imbalance, in this magnificent imbalance is literature. Like Truman Capote in In cold blood
albeit proceeding in reverse, devotes a small space to the crime itself to dwell vice versa on the investigation that narrates the system of ambitions and shortcomings that led to the crime. The imbalance of the narrative body of the two novels (Sister, my only love by Oates e In cold blood by Capote), makes the difference. From the news, from the newspapers, from television, from the pure crime. The literary gesture is the reinvention of time, that unclosed time The promise
by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, there the investigation never resolved, here all the time outside — which precedes or follows. In this dilated time, guilt extends.

In Sister, my only love guilty is the father, Bix Rampike, traitor, womanizer. Guilty Skyler at times jealous of the perfect sister, that he can’t save (could he?). Guilty the pedophile, Gunther Ruscha, who accuses himself of the murder. The women of the Country Club are guilty, the millionaires Betsey wants to reach to make the social climb are guilty. Guilty her, her mother. Guilty long before the real guilt, that is, as soon as he begins to build the perfect little girl, where, in the dimension of exceptionality, the greatest threat is to grow. To cite real cases: Giovanna ***, Italian baby model in the nineties, as well as the only testimonial of Barbie in the world, in an interview, when asked why it was she who represented Barbiereplies: «Maybe I looked a little like us», while the mother corrects: «Barbie it was her”. A mother who complains about the competition not so much between girls, but between mothers: «One of them spread the rumor that I had Giovanna given injections to swell her lips, and that in order not to make her feel sick, I anesthetized her, total anesthesia… yes do you realize? According to her, I anesthetized a six-year-old girl… Giovanna was born this way, her mouth is natural ». Time passes, Giovanna grows, she exceeds one meter and thirty, and she can no longer cover either the role of Barbie nor that of a baby model. The maximum limit in children’s fashion is one meter and thirty. Giovanna’s one foot thirty, Bliss’s twenty kilos.

Aren’t these numbers already a compromised destiny? Prefiguration of the future – to quote Oates: condemnation, warning. Here is the shocking, ferocious portrait of America, and of the whole of contemporaneity. Here is the meaning of the word “mama” repeated hundreds of times in the book: invocation, call. In a real/imaginative crescendo, from the villa in Fair Hills, New Jersey, to Skyler’s head, to cyberspace – the virtual dimension to which Skyler refers, the place where her sister continues to exist: an eternal six-year-old who pirouettes on the ice rink and wins.
Because from a certain point on, no one actually calls mom. The echo, the rumble that falls into thin air is the definitive answer: something irreparable has happened forever, Skyler.

The series curated by Sandro Veronesi

With the third release on newsstands on Wednesday 19 July, «Sister, my only love» by Joyce Carol Oates, with the afterword by Teresa Ciabatti of which we anticipate here a broad summary, continues the Americana series of the «Corriere» edited by Sandro Veronesi ( each volume and 8.90 plus the cost of the newspaper); the first two volumes dedicated to Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo are still on newsstands. A library of 27 great US novels, with prefaces or afterwords by well-known Italian authors. The graphic design is by XxY Studio and the cover images come from The Anonymous Project archive curated by Lee Shulman. Among the forthcoming releases, July 26 “La strada di casa” by Kent Haruf with a preface by Alessandro Piperno, August 2 “Canada” by Richard Ford (Sandro Veronesi), August 9 “The broom of the system” by David Foster Wallace (Edoardo Nesi), the 16 «The interpreter of ailments» by Jhumpa Lahiri (Marco Missiroli).