Gallup Discussion: Lovely, Dark, Deep - Turning Bonobo

Most of Joyce Carol Oates' stories in "Lovely, Dark, Deep" are firmly set in reality.  The problems people have in the story are typically those we could face in the real world.  Three exceptions can be found in the collection.

Forked River Roadside Shrine, South Jersey is a kind of ghost story.  Anyone whose seen a roadside shrine, usually decorated in pictures, flowers, and the occasional teddy bear, immediately knows their meaning.  They exist to memorialize someone who died in a car or motorcycle crash, and often serve a second purpose, reminding everyone of the dangers of the road.  Forked River follows the spirit of "Kevie" as he witnesses people from his past visit his shrine.

Jesters is a very different ghost story, one where the ghosts might be a bit more active in the physical world.  An elderly couple feels harassed by their noisy neighbors, only to find that the house is long abandoned.  But for our discussion group, there were some strange moments in the story where our protagonists' perspectives are called into question, like when they can't figure out which one of them drove to "the Jesters'" house.

The members of our group saw similarly unreliable storytelling in Betrayal.  In this story, a young man gets an internship at the zoo working with bonobos and his parents are not particularly thrilled.  As he grows to love this non-paying job, his father, in particular, becomes hostile towards it, noting there was "no future" in the zoo.  Towards the end, the son seems to disappear, until the parents realize that a new bonobo in the habitat is there son.  He had betrayed them for the bonobos!


In a collection where most of the stories are pretty comfortably grounded in normalcy and upper middle class problems, this is by far the strangest story.  Some of our readers had their doubts about the son, Rickie's, transformation.  Whether the parents were delusional or Rickie really did turn bonobo, the story was a clear metaphor.

Members of the group pointed out Rickie's rejection of his parents' values.  "All of us feel somewhat estranged from our kids," one reader noted.  The parents had a hard time accepting the path Rickie was choosing for himself.  They couldn't understand him, and one person suggested, "the world of bonobos was just as strange to the parents as his own chosen lifestyle."  So maybe they really had thought Rickie turned into a bonobo, but it wouldn't have been much different to them if he had just joined the zoo staff instead.  It still would have been a betrayal in their eyes.