Hell is for children

OH SISTER, WHERE ART THOU? Oates’s new hero charts the aftermath of his sibling’s murder.

Photograph: Marion Ettlinger

In the 11 years since six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was murdered on Christmas Eve and became a de facto National Enquirer cover girl, tabloid culture has morphed into a machine that feeds the public’s endless addiction to rubbernecking. Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel, My Sister, My Love, begins with a disclaimer that her story is a work of fiction, and shouldn’t be read as a representation of the Ramsey case. Yet the similarities between the life and death of the late beauty-pageant winner and the narrative’s doomed prepubescent ice-skating champion, Bliss Rampike, are anything but coincidental. Like her speculative docu-fictions Black Water (1992) and Blonde (2000), Oates’s book purposefully plays with the facts in order to fashion a sharp, often sickeningly macabre satire on upward mobility and the cult of celebrity. And the literary legend’s scathing indictment of what she calls “tabloid hell”—where horrific tragedies become instant grist for the exploitainment mill—is easily recognizable to anyone who’s turned on a TV in the post–O.J. Simpson age.

“When I first wrote about the Ramsey phenomenon for The New York Review of Books, I was a complete amateur on the subject,” Oates, 70, says, calling from her house in Princeton, New Jersey. She’s referring to a 1999 article she wrote on the true-crime tomes that centered around the conspiracies dogging this still-unsolved mystery. “I hadn’t followed the case when everything was first unfolding, though I do remember seeing that same wistful, forlorn picture of JonBenet on magazine covers every time I went to the grocery store. What made me come back to the case is the question: What would it be like to be the surviving sons and daughters, the brothers and sisters of these notorious families that are always in the news? They’re the ones left to deal with ‘tabloid hell.’ How would you deal with a life under constant critical scrutiny?”

In fact, the hero, for lack of a better word, of My Sister, My Love isn’t Bliss but Skyler Rampike, her socially awkward, mentally disturbed older brother (loosely modeled after JonBenet’s own sibling, Burke). He’s the author of the tell-all “memoir” that constitutes Oates’s novel, and it’s through Skyler’s faux-diary that we meet the other Rampikes: mother Betsey, whose obsessions with status and her own fading beauty fuel a maniacal fixation on her daughter’s career; father Bix, a macho former athlete perpetually away on business trips; and younger sister Edna Louise, a lonely prodigy whose preternatural talent earns her local fame, a new showbiz-ready name and, eventually, a tragic end. Though Skyler serves as the book’s Virgil, guiding readers through the nine circles of New Jersey’s class-conscious aristocracy, his presence is primarily signified by the book’s running joke: a series of self-critical footnoted asides that comment on the narrative and consistently emphasize Skyler’s peripheral place in his famous sister’s story.

“I associated him with footnotes right from the start,” Oates explains. “It fit Skyler’s character, this figure who seems to be prowling around the edges. He’s also assuming that someone will eventually read this, and the footnotes are his funny little way of warning people that this won’t be a descent into suffering that ends happily, like A Million Little Pieces or something.” As for the novel’s other big formal conceit—a 50-page novella that suddenly appears a quarter of the way into the book, involving Skyler’s boarding-school romance with a fellow survivor of family tragedy—the author insists that the stylistic time-out was something she was willing to gamble on. “I really love that section,” she admits. “It was my attempt to do a young-adult insert. There’s something about adolescent romances that feels very real to me. He’s trying to reach out to save someone, which he couldn’t do for his sister. The notion of presenting that story as something slightly separate just felt right.”

Despite My Sister, My Love’s merciless dissection of media bottom-feeders (the book’s sharpest jabs are reserved for the daytime talk-show circuit, which underwrites Betsey’s capitalization on her child’s death to become a successful entrepreneur), Oates admits she can understand the appeal of following such tawdry real-life tragedies, even if she doesn’t share the fascination. “I knew women who followed the developments of trials every single day,” she says. “It became a joke about female preoccupations: ‘Men have sports, and we have these cases.’ Yet I think there was a lot of sympathy among women for JonBenet Ramsey, for Laci Peterson, for Natalee Holloway…all these women who became female celebrity victims.” Oates suddenly becomes very quiet. “You know, in a weird way, I guess I have sympathy with JonBenet as well. Not to push any comparisons, but…you feel like you’re trying so hard, you’ve been writing since you’re six years old, you publish all these books. But nonetheless, you feel like it just isn’t enough. It’s never enough.”

My Sister, My Love (HarperCollins, $25.95) is out now. Oates reads July 23 at Bryant Park.