Joshua Seigl, a celebrated but reclusive author, is forced for reasons of failing health to surrender his much-prized bachelor's independence. Advertising for an assistant, he unwittingly embarks upon the most dangerous adventure of his privileged life. Alma Busch, a sensuous, physically attractive young woman with bizarre tattoos covering much of her body, stirs in Seigl a complex of emotions: pity? desire? responsibility? guilt? Unaware of her painful past and her troubled personality, Seigl hires her as his assistant. As the novel alternates between Seigl's and Alma's points of view, the naïve altruism of the one and the virulent anti-Semitism of the other clash in a tragedy of thwarted erotic desire. With her masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates probes the contemporary tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges our accepted limits of desire. The Tattooed Girl may be her most controversial novel.
But Oates doesn't leave us there in the dump. While we have all been damaged in our march through life. Oates insists on making all her characters worthy of being cared about. I think that is her genius. Over and over she tells us -in this book and in others--that being flawed does not equal bad, or pitiful, or unworthy. It is just the state of things and that we cannot understand each other--and possibly improve the human condition--if first we do not accept the fact that human are not only not perfect they are and not perfectible.
