All the Good People I’ve Left Behind by Joyce Carol Oates. Black Sparrow Press, 227 pp. $4.50.
If I had not been reading this book for a review, I might have put it down after the first couple of stories. The first, for instance, concerns a woman who for a time in her mid-twenties is conducting a furtive love affair with a married man and, in successive trips to the hospital, is watching her great aunt die. Her lover is a mess, tiresomely self-deprecating, begging forgiveness for imagined offenses, fearful of being discovered in his adultery. Something in the protagonist, whose name is Annie, holds back from experience and fears it. It is Annie who fears death — her aunt faces it quite bravely — and, on an afternoon meeting with her lover, she imagines a wonderful freedom in leaping from a high rock into the river, but knows she will never do it. When she actually sees some teenagers taking that leap, she is hysterically frightened, and while the story seems to be about her disappointment at her lover’s failure to stop them, it is really about Annie’s fears: of the effortless and joyful leap into life that the teenagers take, of the fearless leap into death that her aunt is taking. Fearful of both, Annie would seem not to have much left.
