Rape: A Love Story

Joyce Carol Oates

Atlantic Books £9.99, pp154

Joyce Carol Oates is an extraordinary writer: she produces immaculate prose in quantity. At the last count, she had written 29 novels, eight thrillers, 23 short story collections, five novellas, eight collections of poetry, seven plays, eight collections of essays and a book for children.

She is a professor at Princeton who, championed by Oprah Winfrey, hit the big time with her 24th novel, When We Were the Mulvaneys. It is right that she should be widely read: she writes about violence in a way that can make Michael Moore seem a hit-and-miss buffoon. Her writing is dainty yet macho - it won't allow you a smile. And she never misses her targets.

Her new novella, Rape: A Love Story, is as powerful as anything she has produced. It is written with a contained fury, fiction in the service of polemic. Reading it, I felt a submerged evangelism at every turn. I felt she was writing for every woman who has ever feared rape or experienced it and for all the women who have seen their attackers walk free from court. It begins as an account of the gang rape of Teena Maguire, a single mother in her thirties, one Fourth of July in Niagara Falls. Teena nearly dies. For a long while, she will feel it would have been better not to have been left alive. Her daughter, Bethie, witnesses the attack.

Right from the start, the narrative is skilfully interlaced with its ugly aftermath, as if to show how a crime contains consequences within it - seeds of the future. Gossip from neighbours about Teena piles up in lazy damnation - violation of another sort: 'She had it coming. She was asking for it'. The usual.

But the author's way of developing this story is anything but usual. This is not journalism. For a start, she makes sure that nothing about the crime is left anonymous or neutral. In her fleeting, incisive way, she gives us a glimpse of Teena's interior life as a faulty, loving mother and a person of grit and gaiety. Someone good.

Teena and her attackers are not the only focus of this book. Oates includes a policeman called Dromoor, a brilliantly conceived character, who fought in the Gulf War. 'One bright, hallucinatory morning in the desert, he saw his soul curl up and die like an inchworm in the hot sand.' Dromoor is a dangerous man. He hasn't lost his soul entirely, or his heart. He makes himself Teena's champion but his morality is compromised. He will turn out to be a deadly practitioner of his own brand of smooth justice. In this discomfiting story, there is no such thing as uncomplicated salvation.

The authorial voice is claustrophobic throughout, and the persistent use of 'you' (much of the novella is addressed to the daughter) turns Joyce Carol Oates into an intimate advocate. Even the moon in the story seems collusive, 'a winking eye'. The irony, from the title onwards, is sometimes almost too much, but it works as an alternative to anger.

The novel is, above all, an attack on misogyny. It is remarkable how fully Oates is able to project herself into the minds of the imbecilic misogynists she describes. Discomfort zones are her forte. She finds myriad ways to hit back at men. She knows how to use proper names to menacing effect. She rolls the names of the rapists around, like marbles in the palm of her hand: Martin Pick, Lloyd Pick. She repeats their names until they blaze with guilt. She has a gift for contemptuous imagery: the judge in Teena Maguire's case, a man in his mid-50s, is as 'squat as a fire hydrant', but, she implies, more likely to cause a fire than put one out. A lawyer is 'basically a mouth'. And Dromoor, as a teenager, is 'sullen and sly like a chimp hiding something behind his back'.

This is a remarkable book, but not to be read for pleasure. Oates wishes us to reflect on the scary randomness of our fates. 'Good luck, bad luck. Hit by lightning, spared by lightning.' (Her focus on this made especially upsetting reading during the London bombings.) She is interested in the difference a day, or a single violent night, may make.