July 3rd, 2008
It's no surprise that prolific super-novelist Joyce Carol Oates, with her appetite for revealing Gothic horrors in family sagas, would choose to pick up the JonBenet Ramsey case for her latest true-crime effort. (1995's "Zombie," about Jeffrey Dahmer, was another notable one.) Beauty pageants become ice-skating competitions and suburban Colorado is swapped for old-money New Jersey in My Sister, My Love, but the disclaimer at the front of the book only makes it clearer how closely the story following hews to what is known about the still-unsolved murder case—and how unsatisfying people still find its meager facts.
Oates' novel explores the Ramsey case through an observer whom even dedicated CNN viewers might not have been aware of: the victim's older brother. Now 19 and estranged from his parents, Skyler Rampike is holed up in a dingy New Brunswick boarding house, writing a tell-all whose copious footnotes, crossed-out lines, and clever chapter titles don't soften his sister's ever-present voice. Skyler was supposed to be a gymnastics prodigy, but parents Betsey and Bix gave up on him after a bad fall at practice. When his sister Edna Louise shows some rinkside promise on a playdate, she becomes Bliss, the youngest star of the girls' ice-skating circuit, with the help of makeup, elaborate costumes, and a team of coaches. Her performances and Betsey's investment in them strain the Rampikes' marriage to the point that Bix moves out; he isn't at home, in fact, the night Bliss disappears from bed, although he returns in time to discover her body in the basement.
One of Skyler's chapters consists of the line, "And they all lived horribly ever after." That's a pretty good summary of the Olympics of guilt through which Oates puts her teenage narrator as he accounts specifically for his crime, revealed in the first chapter, of ignoring his sister's calls the night of the murder. (Bliss was a bed-wetter, as JonBenet was rumored to be, and relied on Skyler to hide the evidence from their mom.) The spiky satire of suburban life, from the fictional maladies with which Skyler is diagnosed to the deck of index cards on which Betsey plots every grocery-store encounter with local society gives way to the familiar Oatesian trope of the intertwining impulses to self-defend and self-punish. At nearly 600 pages, Skyler's narrative eventually apes the self-aggrandizement he spots in his parents, but by then, readers may just want to change the channel.
A.V. Club Rating: B-
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