Joyce Carol Oates is a big deal among the literary elite. So much so the eighty-six year old author is considered a living legend. Her resume–Professor of Creative Writing, Princeton, over fifty novels published, three of them finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as volumes of poetry, short stories and plays–bespeaks gifted intellect, hard work and considerable talent.

So the lady’s got cred, but I’ve never heard of her. That’s no slight. Just means she’s a little rich for my blood.

Not that I read trash. More like “literary pulp”. And that’s what I put in the search. Out popped Joyce Carol Oates. Babysitter.

I immediately recognized the preface. It coalesces around a horrifying true crime case that took place in the 70s in which the killer is known as the Oakland County Child Killer (OCCK) or The Babysitter Killer.

Although the Babysitter claimed four known victims, it is thought that there were many more inner city children trafficked, molested and some murdered by the killer(s) and/or individuals involved in a vast pedophile network that dipped into the most decrepit hovels of Detroit as well as some of the most exclusive, wealthy suburbs in all of the United States. The killer earned the name Babysitter because the four Oakland County victims were found meticulously clean and well fed, though they were held days and, in one case, weeks before they were murdered.

Against this backdrop enters a (bored to tears) upper echelon suburbia wife and mother teetering on forty (and legs as long as Byron’s Don Juan) nearly poreless, bedecked in understated designer wear (logos discreetly–she thinks— forward facing) one Hannah Jarret married to a (moderately) wealthy executive named Wes.

Here I will interject, as I was miming Miss Oates verbose style–in Babysitter at least–the run on sentence, its copious parentheses and inordinate italics. The style is befitting of the character Hannah: exhausting. How you will feel about its prose may very well depend on how you feel about long distance running.

If not acquainted with Oates, you may want to “train” on her earlier works such as the short story, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? I have recently read it and it is superb.

In any event back to Babysitter: Hannah does what any bored, upper echelon suburbia housewife from the 70s would do –or, at least, that’s what Oates in her indictment of time and place would have us believe–she has an affair. It’s her choice of paramour that is eyebrow raising. She knows him only as Y.K.

Whereas as husband Wes is relatively handsome, Y.K. is not. No, not with his heavy, blue lidded eyes. Not with his tawny skin and thick curled toenails; his wire bristled hair and brow of Frankenstein.

His character, no less surly: sadist.

He brutalizes Hannah, yet she is drawn to him. Y.K. is a man of discerning taste. He has money–and designer clothes. These are the prerequisites that Hannah requires.

Oh…and his audacity…he strokes her wrist with his thumb at a gala she’s hosting. She prepares to introduce her children to Y.K. as Babysitter is wreaking havoc, terror and murder, going so far to attack a child in an even more affluent suburb than Hannah’s.

Husband Wes is quick to lay blame at an inner city black man’s door…any inner city black man’s door…but not Hannah. Though comically neurotic to the point of nervous breakdown, poisoned by passive aggression, feminine mystique and white privilege, Hannah knows Babysitter is not in the order of the other, but a grandmaster of us.

Still she hesitates to sound the alarm, stymied by fear of gossip…Wes’ secret Swiss bank accounts…his influential family…their high priced attorneys…her Saint Laurent wardrobe. Indeed, Hannah could loose everything.

As a near fembot navigating Oates cliched environs, the question is not will she, but how could she not?