Some 30 years ago, Joyce Carol Oates produced Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance and The Mysteries of Winterthurn, novels that combined campy gothic thrills with romance and mystery. During that same period, in 1984, Oates started the novel that would become The Accursed, but she dropped the project for three decades before taking it up again.
The Accursed was inspired by Oates’ move to Princeton, N.J., where she holds a chair in Humanities at Princeton University. Historic Princeton, as town and university, is a major character in the novel. In Oates’ prologue, a dreamlike account of approaching Princeton by carriage, the lushly gothic atmosphere recalls the opening of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, if only its nameless narrator had been a time traveler. Visiting one’s past, it seems, is very like trying to go back to Manderley.
The “accursed” of the title are a first family of Princeton, the Slades, whose virtuous public image hides a dark, festering secret known only to their patriarch. The saintly Rev. Dr. Winslow Slade is elderly now, but his four grandchildren, one by one, fall victim to the evil that invades Princeton, as insidiously as the serpent in Eden.
Other Princetonians, too, are afflicted by the demons who haunt the Slades, and hitherto proper citizens are easily led astray by the louche, fatal charms of incubus and succubus. The demon even, at one point, impersonates Sherlock Holmes — although, as he explains to his dupe, “ ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is a fictitious character, and a pseudonym. My name is private, and will never be revealed, as Conan Doyle has promised.”
Among the historical characters in the novel are Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton and a future president of the United States; Grover Cleveland, the former president, who retired in Princeton; and Theodore Roosevelt, who is president in 1905, when the curse first manifests itself.
None of the three presidents escapes evisceration by Oates’ razor-sharp wit, and there are some accurate elements in her satire. Wilson is portrayed as prissy and prejudiced, Cleveland as obese and uncouth. Her T.R. is a grinning, gung-ho imperialist: “It seemed that the President was accustomed to entertaining his listeners and himself with a performance of serio-comic genius: gruff, blustery, big-toothed, excessive and exaggerated, with a high squeaking voice issuing from the fleshy face.”
Oates gets in shrewd digs at Wilson’s deep loathing of suffragists: “Yet more repulsive was the thought, if women were allowed the vote, might it then follow that women would run for political office? The very thought was outrageous! Imagine, a female senator! A female President! The United States would be the laughingstock of the world.”
The Accursed also spends considerable time with three notable writers of the period: Upton Sinclair, who lived in Princeton; Jack London, a Socialist colleague of Sinclair’s; and Samuel Clemens, who as Mark Twain was the grand old man of American letters. Twain comes off slightly better than the other two, though the dark side of his character leads him to calculatedly undermine Wilson’s puritanism, promoting a flirtation with their seductive hostess during a Bermuda vacation.
London, meanwhile, turns out to be a talented but alcoholic phony who severely disappoints his insecure disciple, Sinclair: “Upton had not wanted to think that the first president of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society had arrived at Carnegie Hall in a drunken, or semi-drunken, state, but this did seem to be the case.”
The Accursed blends history, horror, fantasy and black comedy into a trippy literary brew. For fans of Oates’ gothic works, this is a heady draught indeed.
Joyce Sáenz Harris is a freelance writer in Dallas.
Joyce Carol Oates