Demon's Grip YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS

By R.Z. Sheppard

References to Joyce Carol Oates are usually modified by "prolific," used in a sniffy way as if she were promiscuous with her word processor. The idea that nice authors don't write around (18 novels, dozens of short stories, poems, criticism and a book on boxing) is consistent with a period that is excessively self-conscious about its artistic urges. It is unlikely that Victor Hugo, Balzac or Trollope was ever accused of scriptomania.

A more reasonable complaint is that Oates' taste for disaster frequently exceeds the appetite of her readers. This was not always so, especially in earlier novels like them (1969), a tale of desperate lives played out over 30 years, from the Depression to the Detroit riots of 1967. Timing helped; the agitated style of the book matched the panicky mood of the '60s.

You Must Remember This is about the less noisy desperation of the 1950s. For some it was the threshold of the affluent society. For the Stevick family of "Port Oriskany," an industrial city in western New York State, the decade is their introduction to the Age of Anxiety. The H-bomb, the Korean War and McCarthyism affect different Stevicks in different ways. Father Lyle, bookish owner of a secondhand furniture store, builds a bomb shelter in his backyard. Mother Hannah worries that this means they will never move from the sliding neighborhood, and Son Warren, wounded at Imjin, returns home to join the nuclear-disarmament movement.

Oates' sharpest focus is on Daughter Enid, 15, a model student, talented pianist and promising gymnast. On page one, the girl locks herself in the bathroom and swallows 47 aspirins. The reason is a recent sexual encounter with an uncle. Felix Stevick is an ex-prizefighter, a local hero with enough low animal cunning to trade in real estate and keep a dirty secret. Incest later turns into a full-blown affair, documented in harsh and steamy detail.

The generation of the '50s was not dubbed "Silent" for nothing. Understandably, Enid does not tell anyone about her taboo love life. She had even failed to leave a suicide note. In contrast to later decades, the Eisenhower years did not encourage the confessional style, or discussions about teenage sexuality and domestic forms of statutory rape.

Enid Stevick is clearly intended to be a victim of her time, but she is also a willing prisoner of passion. One of Oates' main subjects has always been the irrational nature of intense feelings. Love, says Warren near book's end, "seems to carry with it no knowledge." The same could be said of lust, fear and anger, emotions that are generously apportioned to the novel's characters. The effect is dramatic but limiting, like old-fashioned literary naturalism in which free will is swamped by determinism and animal instincts.

Unlike so many of her contemporaries, Oates has the imagination and the ambition to attempt a big novel. But she overdoes it, as if in the grip of a writing demon. Frequently the book seems compiled rather than composed, facts and fiction accreting into a formidable but unshapely mass. There are even chunks on boxing in the '50s, as if the fight game had the same historical impact as the Rosenberg trial or the policies of "Engine Charley" Wilson, the Secretary of Defense. You Must Remember This takes lots of wild swings; it is what happens when a fearless slugger goes toe to toe with a big, elusive opponent.