Joyce Carol Oates. A Widow’s Story: a memoir. Harper Collins, 2011.

If you want to write a memoir, there are 3 questions to be answered in advance:

Would this book be published if the people weren’t famous?
Is there a story here sufficient to engage an audience?
Is this a story that the main characters would want told?

It is questionable whether this book would be published if the people weren’t famous.

That said, A Widow’s Story, is indeed a book that reaches people who have lost “significant others” in their lives, despite its flaws. The vulnerability of the survivor, the active absence of the deceased person, the important decisions that must be made – and then lived with – at a time of profound shock. All of these themes are all-too-relevant to too many people.

These themes could be explored sufficiently in a non-fiction article. Only if the outlines of the story are somehow compelling does it make sense to tell the story in a 400-page book.

A 400-page book about an ordinary life in rather ordinary times can be an embarrassment. Here, a reserved author who declares her lifelong abhorrence of bringing the personal revelation into her professional activities, lays out her marriage, her husband’s reticence as well, and then exposes aspects of his life which, during his life, he chose not to discuss.

In fact, the marriage that takes up the book, a genuinely devoted and deeply treasured marriage, is marked by similar reserve. He does not read her fiction or critique it. She does not read his drafts of an unfinished novel. Neither knows much about what occurs in the other’s study.

This is a life of academic privilege (Princeton), a sense that wealth should protect a person from catastrophe, such as the medical disaster that caused the book to be born, and with it the confession of such daily habit and preferences that the reader is sometimes embarrassed for the bereaved author.

The only name they called each other was “Honey” (p. 24). A favorite meal of canned soup (15). Coupled with exposure: a sibling’s apparent lobotomy, a sibling of the other’s life-long institutionalization. Matters kept silent for 47 years, matters even kept out of the couple’s social interactions: exposed.

And at the same time, a vagueness pervades.

The husband was driven by his wife to “the contagious hospital,” which their friends avoided, claiming that the Princeton area medical care was not good enough. Oates mentions the hospital’s odor. Perhaps a danger sign? Or perhaps a sign of an older building?

Let it be noted that deaths like her husband’s can take place in hospitals where there is no such odor.

This much is clear. The wife drove the car, but the choice of ER appears to be a shared decision.

In short order, the husband has died of a hospital-acquired infection, which the wife who writes the book never fully identifies. Offered the choice of an autopsy, she reflexively refuses.

Of course, she refuses. Her husband’s body is still somewhat warm under her hand. She can see the terrible bruising caused by his IVs. She does not wish further assaults on his body. She has been wakened out of her first sleep in a week to come to the hospital, because he is failing, though still alive.

And she has not been warned that this could happen.

Now it has. Even if she had been warned, she would have been unprepared – for this. But, if she had been warned, she might have had the opportunity to consider that obscene choice: autopsy. She might have had the helpfulness of a friend to talk it through.

She might not have been left with eternal bewilderment, one which is shared by her husband’s doctors, who were not directly involved in his care, but who are surprised.

All of this is important to tell. It is happening way too often even at a time when some studies are suggesting the infection rates are dropping in hospitals. Stories like this one leave one wondering whether the infection rates are really dropping – otherwise, why would we have so many terrible stories to tell – or whether hospitals, threatened by loss of reimbursements when they bill for treatment of these infections, have simply learned to cover them up more effectively.

Joyce Carol Oates will never know. She said No to autopsy for perfectly valid reasons. She apparently has not thought to retrieve her husband’s medical records. Her contacts with two of her husband’s doctors have both been so lacking in human compassion (and so commonplace) that it would be natural for her to overlook the records.

And so far – this is a story, because it lacks detail, that would be important to tell – at the very least, as a warning to others – but in a few dozen pages.

A Widow’s Story, however, takes up more than 400 pages, as if the author is writing out her grief until her grief recedes sufficiently to let her breathe again. Until it recedes enough to let her write about something else.

Others who have lived ordinary lives in decades of ordinary marriages, in marriages where there are significant reticences, may be comforted by the sorrow, anger, and guilts of this book.

But even as they are comforted by familiarity, which is expressed in a breach of reticence, readers may also wonder if the book should have been written – like this.

This brings one to question 3: Is this a story that the deceased husband would have wished his wife to tell?

From everything, Oates writes about Ray Smith, the answer is clearly, No. Yet, in his indulgence of her, his husbanding of her, his tolerance of her, I could also imagine his saying to her, Well, go ahead if you think that is something you need to do.

His editor’s pen, however, would not like the repetitions that serve little purpose: the red quilt down coat that I wore the night of the accident or no sooner am I away from home than I yearn to return to it. These details recur with such frequency that this reader soon came to anticipate them.

A Widow’s Story is poorly edited, is often far too vague suggesting it hides more than it reveals. The house in Princeton with its 10 foot high redwood fence to keep out deer and human strangers is a house of glass in which there are few places to hide. The house is an apt metaphor for the book.

The story is worth telling, but probably would not have been told, had its author not been famous. The story is a common story of marriage at a particular time and place in the United States, when polite reticence was still valued, and people called each other “Honey.”

But if the author were not so famous, the book might well have been shorter, more specific, and better edited.

Spork Minor aka Martha Deed