On the Rack

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE WHEEL OF LOVE AND OTHER STORIES by Joyce Carol Oates. 440 pages. Vanguard. $6.95.

Oates people are among the most painful characters in contemporary American fiction. Some are dullards entranced by chilling fogs of unsorted emotions who stumble into disaster and violence. Some are lovers whose needs are more alive than their satisfactions. Precocious youths and intelligent adults are driven to madness and suicide by the cruel clarity of their perceptions. There are also the survivors who have learned to stay afloat by discarding their vitality.

Often, Joyce Carol Oates' creations suggest 19th century romantic novels: a Tolstoy heroine tuned to the breaking point over the frets of love, a Dostoevsky soul glutton, a Stendhal glory hound. The settings, however, are strictly 20th century American, illuminated by sheets of cold neon. Urban infestations where "taxes are rising and the tax base is falling," suburbs that miraculously exist for hours without the visible presence of human life, transitional neighborhoods where elderly holdouts keep their white elephants alive by secretly feeding them boarders.

Without exception, the stories in this collection unspool into a world of loneliness, yearning and blood. Auto crashes seem to be fatefully programmed into the character of the victims. A girl imagines the Southwest as an optical illusion of sunshine and sand divided by highways. The designs of small animals are mashed into the hot roadway, "run over again and again by big trucks and retired people seeing America."

A number of these stories are haunted by people who have difficulty feeling as real as the objects that surround them. They feel the emotion of emotion's lack, a heaviness that Miss Oates conveys with the same compassionate talent that helped make her novel Them last year's National Book Award winner.

But she is at her best when indulging an obsession with characters whose bodies are inhabited by insatiable demons. Nadia. of the title story, hungers to be more than herself. "If I have to be just one person," she tells her husband, "I'll kill myself." She does, and her husband is left to reflect on her not as a woman he loved without tenderness but as a natural element that he needed for his own survival. And the reader is left to reflect too. About the emptiness and boredom that addicts some people to the idea of leading serial lives, about the consumer culture that feeds the idea with fantasies, and about the society that provides the opportunities to realize those fantasies --for better or worse.

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