Though I've long been a fan of Oates' work, I must admit that my interest in her 2008 novel "My Sister, My Love" (an account of the life of a transmogrified Burke Ramsey prior to and after the murder of a transmogrified JonBenet) was more than merely theoretical: having lived in Boulder, CO, at the time the travesty occurred, and having had friends (however perfunctorily/ludicrously) interrogated as suspects in the event, the unsolved case is something of a rite of passage for me...
one of those terrible events that occur simultaneously in one's nostalgia.
The short, oft-allegedly unhappy life of JonBenet Ramsey is, of course, ideal for Oates as a subject: she has a long history of writing, in singularly moving and unique ways, about victimization and the victimization of women and girls in particular...
"Black Water"'s reimagined Mary Jo Kopechne, "Blonde"'s reimagined Marilyn Monroe, the slain twin sisters of "Heat", the hapless Connie in the legendary "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been".
"Sister" is narrated by nineteen year old Skyler Rampike, private school expulsee, "general fuckup," and intermittently recovering junkie, who is estranged from father Bix following mother Betsey's deathbed disclosure (in the form of a grainy, blurry, nightmarish videotape) of what really happened the night his sister "Bliss" was found murdered in the basement of the family's mansion in the swanky upscale neighborhood of Fair Hills, NJ.
Though accused by some as being a bit too much of a digressive satire on the overdone theme of corruption in white upperclass suburbia, Sister is, rather, a wholly viable (if comically, hideously, & deliberately exaggerated) examination of the media image (whether false or true) of the Ramsey family itself; not to mention a powerful and empathetic portrayal of its young protagonist/survivor.
The novel's beginning finds Skyler coming off eleven years of "tabloid hell"...
an adolescence destroyed by his sister's murder, the well hidden but thorough American Gothic depravity of his parents, and the string of grotesque child psychiatrists & increasingly ludicrous "diagnoses" he's forced to endure, all without any emotional support network to turn to but his own instincts and innate sense of right and wrong.
(There are shades of John, forced to protect his younger sister Pearl, in Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter" here, though Oates' all too vulnerable Skyler is nowhere near as shrewd and capable as all that).
Perhaps the most disturbing and powerful aspect of Joyce's vision, then, is that it's filtered through the sensibilities of a child: Skyler & Bliss seem trapped in a kind of unwilling "Die Blechtrommel" under the mercy of monstrous and hugely aggrandized adults, like the world through the eyes of children in Mark Ryden paintings.
Betsey Rampike's face appears to her son in a rear view mirror running and distorted with rain as "strangely shaped as a moon that has been flattened" her eyes "bulgy and shiny wet;" 5 am on the morning of the murder finds her stumbling around in "pancake makeup haphazardly applied, or in poor light," lipstick "freshly applied and thick-caked as if smeared without a mirror and now partially eaten away," "something sour in her breath," her smile "charged with the wrath of God.
" But the adolescent Skyler also has an emotional life of his own, rendered painfully real and painfully bittersweet by supporting characters like his first love, the equally fucked up and equally traumatized anorexic cutter Heidi Harkness, and the beaten down father figure Pastor Bob, the only good adult in the book, who eventually sets Skyler on the path to personal redemption/deliverance.
One can't help but wonder what kind of legalities Oates had to clear pending the publication of this book...
it seems rife for lawsuits, right down to its variation on that infamous ransom note.
But as distinct and unique as her fictionalized Rampikes are, the story she presents here remains, pending further information and evidence we may never have, as plausible a hypothesis for the case's true life situation as anything else; and this is undeniably part of what gives "Sister" its particular power, and makes the character of Skyler Rampike so particularly moving and human.
one of those terrible events that occur simultaneously in one's nostalgia.
The short, oft-allegedly unhappy life of JonBenet Ramsey is, of course, ideal for Oates as a subject: she has a long history of writing, in singularly moving and unique ways, about victimization and the victimization of women and girls in particular...
"Black Water"'s reimagined Mary Jo Kopechne, "Blonde"'s reimagined Marilyn Monroe, the slain twin sisters of "Heat", the hapless Connie in the legendary "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been".
"Sister" is narrated by nineteen year old Skyler Rampike, private school expulsee, "general fuckup," and intermittently recovering junkie, who is estranged from father Bix following mother Betsey's deathbed disclosure (in the form of a grainy, blurry, nightmarish videotape) of what really happened the night his sister "Bliss" was found murdered in the basement of the family's mansion in the swanky upscale neighborhood of Fair Hills, NJ.
Though accused by some as being a bit too much of a digressive satire on the overdone theme of corruption in white upperclass suburbia, Sister is, rather, a wholly viable (if comically, hideously, & deliberately exaggerated) examination of the media image (whether false or true) of the Ramsey family itself; not to mention a powerful and empathetic portrayal of its young protagonist/survivor.
The novel's beginning finds Skyler coming off eleven years of "tabloid hell"...
an adolescence destroyed by his sister's murder, the well hidden but thorough American Gothic depravity of his parents, and the string of grotesque child psychiatrists & increasingly ludicrous "diagnoses" he's forced to endure, all without any emotional support network to turn to but his own instincts and innate sense of right and wrong.
(There are shades of John, forced to protect his younger sister Pearl, in Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter" here, though Oates' all too vulnerable Skyler is nowhere near as shrewd and capable as all that).
Perhaps the most disturbing and powerful aspect of Joyce's vision, then, is that it's filtered through the sensibilities of a child: Skyler & Bliss seem trapped in a kind of unwilling "Die Blechtrommel" under the mercy of monstrous and hugely aggrandized adults, like the world through the eyes of children in Mark Ryden paintings.
Betsey Rampike's face appears to her son in a rear view mirror running and distorted with rain as "strangely shaped as a moon that has been flattened" her eyes "bulgy and shiny wet;" 5 am on the morning of the murder finds her stumbling around in "pancake makeup haphazardly applied, or in poor light," lipstick "freshly applied and thick-caked as if smeared without a mirror and now partially eaten away," "something sour in her breath," her smile "charged with the wrath of God.
" But the adolescent Skyler also has an emotional life of his own, rendered painfully real and painfully bittersweet by supporting characters like his first love, the equally fucked up and equally traumatized anorexic cutter Heidi Harkness, and the beaten down father figure Pastor Bob, the only good adult in the book, who eventually sets Skyler on the path to personal redemption/deliverance.
One can't help but wonder what kind of legalities Oates had to clear pending the publication of this book...
it seems rife for lawsuits, right down to its variation on that infamous ransom note.
But as distinct and unique as her fictionalized Rampikes are, the story she presents here remains, pending further information and evidence we may never have, as plausible a hypothesis for the case's true life situation as anything else; and this is undeniably part of what gives "Sister" its particular power, and makes the character of Skyler Rampike so particularly moving and human.
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