They All Just Went Away is an essay about the relationship between house and home, and the relationship between people of different social status. But it is much more than that. It depicts a slice of life as if it were a bit of bruised fruit, with all its seeds, and complexities, left intact.
Wow. Joyce Carol Oates has my attention. Starting from the somewhat hackneyed trope of life through the eyes of a child, Oates launches into an immediate digression on the romance of abandoned buildings. Her characterization, and contrast of these spaces when viewed through the ideas of differing artists (Hopper, Burchfield) and what they imply serves as a strong frame through which the life of the Weidel family is viewed. I find myself wanting to type some of her paragraphs as an example of the best that concrete metaphor has to offer:
The abandoned, the devastated, was the profound experience, whereas the involvement in family life— the fever, the bliss, the abrasions, the infinite distractions of human love— was so clearly temporary. Like a television screen upon which antic images (at this time, in the fifties, minimally varying gradations of gray) appear fleetingly and are gone.
I feel that the reader is expected not to take the resulting tragic story as a tear-jerker, so much as an example of the story behind the structures. The fact that structures endure, like tragic monuments is at the core of the story; the story contains no happy feel-good ending. Oates accepts the barrier between herself and Ruth Weidel, though she does her best to break it down. Some things can’t be fixed.
Oates powerfully shapes the images through metaphor, Mr. Weidel’s burning down the house like an act of pissing on it, the house being “condemned” in the same way that the people who lived in it were, and the ultimate resolution, “they all just went away” rings true to real life and real experience. This is an excellent essay, and a tremendous example of using “the ideas in things.” Unlike many ham-fisted memoirs, this one cries out to be taken seriously.
