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Delights
, ironically named for the Hieronymous Bosch triptych, has three parts, each named for a man to whom the central figure, Clara Walpole, is related as daughter, lover, and mother. Ostensibly the novel is Clara’s story, but as a poor and uneducated girl, Clara has few choices, and although Oates has given the child Clara versions of some of her experience, particularly her elementary schooling, the male characters have much more scope for action and drama. In part I, the most naturalistic part of the novel, Carleton Walpole is a migrant fruit picker, with vague aspirations to a more meaningful and dignified life, but trapped by an adolescent marriage and many children. His heroes are boxers, like Jack Dempsey, who prove their manhood by stoic endurance: “The more punches a man takes, the closer he is to the end.” Angry and discouraged, Carleton is disgusted by his pregnant wife, Pearl, a “sallow-faced sullen woman with hair she never washed, and her underarms stale and sour, body soft as a rotted watermelon.” In his mind, women have no real will, but can only fight against nature not to let go of their youth and beauty; “when a woman does, that’s the end. Like letting a garden go to weeds.”
    Although his delicate, blond daughter Clara is pretty and intelligent, she can envision no routes out of her environment but stealing and sex; the pregnant female bodies that repel Carleton are her unescapable destiny. As a little girl, she dreams of becoming a teacher, but the teacher calls her “white trash.” As a young teenager, she tells Lowry, a mysterious blond man with a sharp profile like the jack of spades, “I don’t know what I want, but I want it!” In her powerlessness, Clara gambles on Lowry because he provides an immediate means of escape, even though she has no plan or destination.
    Part II is named for Lowry, although he remains a shadowy and enigmatic character. A drifter and a loner, Lowry likes “just to be in motion”; he likes his car, and the act of driving. But he “don’t stay in one place long.” He takes Clara along as his passenger, helps her find a room and a job in his hometown of Tintern, New York (a version of Lockport), and eventually takes her virginity, in a scene where Clara, although willing, “felt as if he had gone after her with a knife.” Although Clara knows by this point that she doesn’t want to get married (“You just end up having babies”), she falls back into the ancient scenario; she becomes pregnant, Lowry leaves, and she is forced to deploy her resources of female sexuality, beauty, and cunning in order to survive.
    In her most self-determining act, Clara seduces a prosperous married businessman, Curt Revere, and persuades him that he has fathered her child. “Today she changed the way her life was going and it was no accident.” In another sign of Clara’s partial taking of control, Revere teaches her to drive and buys her a car. Clara finally has wheels but nowhere to go, and she imagines that her infant son, Swan, will grow up to live out her fantasies: “He’s going by train and by airplane/All around the world,” she croons to the sleeping baby.
    But Swan too is doomed. In part III we meet Swan as a teenager, bookish and intense, an artist manqué, but ultimately a failure who seeks manhood and control in a gun, and destroys himself. Clara’s fate is to watch endlessly as her fantasies play in their most elemental form on television: “She seemed to like best programs that showed men fighting, swinging from ropes, shooting guns and driving fast cars, killing the enemy again and again until the dying gasps of evil men were only a certain familiar rhythm away from the opening blasts of the commercials which changed only gradually over the years.” While this passage from the original text of the novel is overtly satirical about the mindless violence and repetition of television, it is also a terse and tragic image of Clara’s helpless