The Sacrifice: A Novel
“sharp and in perfect pitch. Overall, Oates exhibits extremely fine authorial control, showing her puppet-master’s strings only when she wants.”
Joyce Carol Oates is a writer’s writer.
The characters in The Sacrifice exemplify the worst that one human can believe of one another and the worst that one can do to one another. Characters are driven by hurt, fear, ambition and greed. To each other, they display misunderstanding, misjudgment, ill will, race-hatred, and self-hatred. Reading The Sacrifice is like watching a finely constructed, beautifully moving train wreck.
Set in 1987 in Pascayne, New Jersey, the reader is introduced to Ednetta Frye, crazed and suffering with grief, who is searching for her daughter Sybilla, 14 and recently gone missing.
Ednetta wanders the neighborhood of Red Rock, an “Inner-city Island of burnt out houses, boarded up and abandoned buildings, potholed streets and decaying sidewalks . . .” She shows Sybilla’s photograph to anyone who crosses her path. “Along wide windy Trenton Avenue here came Ednetta Frye lurching into the Diamond Café, and to the Wig-a-Do Shop, and into AMC Loans and Bail Bond, and into storefront Goodwill where the manager offered to call 911 for her to report her daughter missing and Ednetta said with a little scream drawing back with a look of anguish No! No po-lice How’d I know the Pascayne police ain’t the ones taken my girl!”
Bound, beaten, and apparently raped and left to die in the basement of an abandoned fish factory, Sybilla, alive but weak, is found the next day. Oates telegraphs her punches through foreshadowing, providing characters that cannot be said to be exactly reliable, instead characters are at cross-purposes and self-destructive. Good characters are not all good, and bad characters have a good reason for being bad.
For example, though 911 is promptly called, the ambulance takes sixteen minutes to travel two miles. The EMT comments on the delay, “Sixteen minutes but we’d been slowed down on the bridge and the 911 dispatcher gave us an incomplete address . . . We said, there was no difference between this emergency summons and any other— except what would be made of it, later.” Though Sybilla tells a detective about her attackers, “They had white faces an one of them a badge like a cop would wear or a state trooper an they had guns . . .” she is quickly relegated into to a minor role, sullen and refusing to talk to adults.
The woman who found Sybilla, Sybilla’s substitute teacher, expresses hurt and anger from not being thanked enough for saving Sybilla’s life, using her interior dialog to reflect on her own education, “Her social studies teacher had said that if you knew your history, you would be empowered by this knowledge. And if you failed to know your history, you would be deprived of power.”
In the claustrophobic world of The Sacrifice, even those who know their history have been deprived of power. Larger themes are voiced through smaller events. The reader discovers in character’s actions class politics, race politics, gender politics, religious politics, power politics, and generational politics. Oates also weaves in, in her role as narrator, commentary on civil rights history and the “riots” in Newark in the summer of 1976, to the citizens of Red Rock a painful memory, still.
In describing the Newark “riots” Oates consistently presents the word “riot” in scare-quotes, to signal that “riot” is the word used by oppressors. The toll: 700 injured and 27 dead, including two police officers, a baby, and a grandmother. Oates tells us more than once that in Newark, National Guardsmen shot through windows into people’s homes. Consider Ednetta’s response in the first chapter to calling the police in this light, “No! No po-lice How’d I know the Pascayne police ain’t the ones taken my girl!”
Chapter by chapter The Sacrifice reads like a connected series of one-acts. Each is short but complete, a jewel-like vignette, sharp and in perfect pitch. Overall, Oates exhibits extremely fine authorial control, showing her puppet-master’s strings only when she wants.
Oates also shows off her sly sense of humor by sometimes going over the top. More than one chapter left this reviewer thinking, “I can’t believe that Oates (or one of her characters) said that!” And more than one chapter left this reviewer thinking, “Wow!”
As a final note, there is one inaccuracy that may be detected by fans of police procedurals. Oates repeatedly identifies the police handgun as the “9mm revolver.” In 1987, the police handgun would have been a .38 or .38 special, a revolver, and today has been phased out. The handgun in use by police forces today is the 9mm semi-automatic, which is not a revolver.