A brilliant confidence artist

Author: By Robert Taylor

Date: SUNDAY, June 28, 1998

Page: C3

Section: Books

``My Heart Laid Bare'' (the lush romantic title is suggested by Poe) follows the fortunes of the dynasty of Abraham Licht from the turn of the century to the early 1940s. But the time line the narrative travels also threads a timeless zone of myth. Like his biblical namesake, Licht sees his immortality in his family. And before the modern story begins, a prologue shows the family forebear, Sarah, a maid apprehended for stealing an aristocrat's jewels, who is transported to Marblehead as an indentured servant, reappears in Virginia as a bogus princess, is unmasked again, and after perils and escapes is hunted down and shot in spectral Muirkirk swamp.

Oates employs the conventions of family saga that hold TV audiences spellbound, but mingles straightforward narrative with devices such as interior monologue and prose poem. Indeed the connection to Melville's confidence artist is suggestive, since both books have an important theme of metaphysical role-playing. Abraham Licht pursues what he calls The Game, which on one level is merely the social game of identities, yet on another implies supernatural energies. Without a strong story and vivid characters, this would amount to hollow parable -- but Oates is in total control; it is possible to enjoy the novel simply for its dramatic set pieces.

Abraham elects to rear his family in an abandoned stone church on the fringe of the marsh. Other members of the clan include his sons, the intrepid Thurston and the simian Harwood; a beautiful daughter, Millicent, practicing the deceits of The Game with zest and assurance; Darian, who finds in music a refuge from the world's discord; and Elisha, the black son by adoption -- Abraham's outcast heir and Millie's erstwhile lover. Elisha, of course, carries the most mythic weight. He assumes various identities: an innocent diverting the others with minstrel-show antics; a man in the wrong place during a Harlem race riot; at length he becomes a ranting demagogue, Prince Elihu, who preaches incendiary sermons against the demonized white race.

The transformations of Abraham begin with an evocative scam in which he is ``A. Washburn Frelicht,'' the inventor of the zodiacal racetrack tip sheet, whose gentlemanly manner wins the approbation of the upper-crust burghers of Chautauqua Falls, N.Y. The atmospheric period racing details -- the horses jogging out of the paddock, the white silk purses heavy with prize money tied to the finish line, the elastic web barrier of the starting gate -- culminate in a surprise as precisely misleading as a conjurer's patter.

Part of the novel's appeal lies in the meticulous structure of the family's frauds. There is, for example, the comedy of ``The Society for the Reclamation & Restoration of E. Auguste Napoleon Bonaparte,'' a secret order formed by one Francois-Leon Claudel (a.k.a. Abraham Licht) on behalf of the heirs of the illegitimate son of the emperor. According to the society, the exile on St. Helena sired a son, and his inheritance over the years increased so that by 1912 it had become a prodigious fortune. Approximately 300 relatives and heirs have been located in North America; suddenly 3,000 descendants, anticipating the bonanza to come, are contributing money they presume will be applied to legal expenses.

While the Napoleonic caper is comic, other schemes, like Harwood's assumption of the identity of a rich young Easterner who has disappeared during a fishing trip in the mountains of New Mexico, carry sinister overtones. Oates's dazzling rhetoric, in which she comments on the action as a detached observer, switches voices, and uses italics to reveal the inner world of the characters, has an incantatory rhythm of its own. Here is Harwood, the dark brother, whose activities are usually associated with feral creatures:

``Always he feels he's being cheated. This is the American credo -- I'm being cheated! Somebody else, anybody else, is doing better than I am; deserving no more, but reaping far more than I am; life cheats me, or other men cheat me, or women; I have yet to receive my due, and never will. If liked, I'm not sufficiently liked. If loved, not sufficiently loved. If admired, not sufficiently admired. If feared, not sufficiently feared. Harwood's numerous identities have yielded numerous rewards, it's true, and there have been times when his pockets have bulged with thousands of dollars; but never so much as he expected or deserved. Never so much as another man might have reaped in his place.

``I could murder you all he thinks pleasantly, strolling along the bustling Denver streets.''

That ``he thinks pleasantly'' shows Oates's adroitness, her skill at moving the camera once more at the end of a passage combining so many points of view.

Unfortunately, ``My Heart Laid Bare'' tends to forfeit epic romance in its final section. The introduction of historical characters into the realm of fable, the eerie swamp fires of the family Licht, add a dimension of contrary realism. Abraham's involvement with the Harding administration, Gaston B. Means, and the Red Scare, though robustly imagined, shifts the focus away from the allegorical family toward social documentation; the impact of the 1929 stock market crash on Abraham's psyche is an intrusion upon the haunted shriek of the owl, the terror-stricken cry of the hare, and the keening of a phantom who died in the wilds of the Muirkirk swamp. Still, this subtly ironic generational saga may well be Joyce Carol Oates's finest novel -- and the gossamer allusion on Page 365, where Madame de Vionnet presides over a brothel, deserves kowtows from fans of Henry James's ``The Ambassadors.''

``I am not ill -- I am well.''

``I am not ill -- I am well.''

This mantra the patients of the Parris Clinic, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, are instructed to chant one hundred or more times a day; silently or together in a swelling communal orison; with eyes open or tightly shut. . . . Here, the infirm are taught that as the physical being can be cured of affliction by way of elixirs, diet, hot baths, hydrotherapy, herbal medicines and the like, so too can the spiritual being be cured of its more insidious afflictions by way of Self-Mastery. It's an Eastern discipline descended from ancient yogic practices and Buddhist teachings yet as Dr. Bies and Dr. Liebknecht insist it's a discipline uniquely suited to North America -- ``Where will and destiny are one.''

JOYCE CAROL OATES

From ``My Heart Laid Bare''