Product Description

Celebrated author Joshua Seigl, an idiosyncratic bachelor and confirmed recluse—young but in failing health—reluctantly admits to himself that he must hire a live-in assistant to help him with his increasingly complicated professional and personal affairs. Then one day at the bookstore he encounters Alma, a young woman covered with bizarre tattoos, who stirs something inside him. Unaware of her torturous past—the abuses she's suffered, the wrongs she's committed, the virulent hatred that seethes within her—Seigl decides that she is the one, and he has no idea that he is bringing an enemy into his home.

With her unique, masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates probes the tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges the accepted limits of desire.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #373847 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Books in Canada
Like a potty-mouthed child, Joyce Carol Oates craves attention. Cranking out the obscenities with the grueling regularity of McDonald’s hamburgers, she’s a logorrheic wonder (30 novels under her own name, 8 under the pseudonym Rosamind Smith; 19 short story collections; 8 volumes of poetry; 8 books of essays; 7 plays; 4 novellas; one book for children and one for young adults). With the bloodhound nose of a tabloid hack, she seizes-rabidly, rapaciously, and with a Rotweiler’s tenacity-onto the sensationalistic, glazes, gussies it up with a fancy-pants scrim of “literary” respectability and churns out yet another butter-slick slab of gassy grabby opportunism. Pushing buttons with pert aplomb, her books bulge with perky sleaze, with etiolated crassness, enervated vulgarity. They teem with a dreary, pummeling misogyny: there’s a weirdly prurient masochism to Oates’s writing masquerading as a critique of gender relations. No deviance is too tired to flog, no sadistic tic too trivial to histrionically inflate to Satanic proportions.
Case in point: The Tattooed Girl. Story is simple enough…Joshua Seigl is a critically celebrated, financially entitled but chary author. For reasons of an ambiguous ailment he’s obliged to give up his hermetic loner’s existence and take on an assistant.
Enter Alma Busch: girl of title. Amateurishly, grotesquely tattooed by unnamed malevolent third parties in her ferociously toxic Pennsylvania mining hometown (a town both environmentally toxic-in the form of perpetual underground fires-and fascistically, racially toxic in the form of rampant anti-Semitism, and rampant anti-everything-else-but-us-ism). Alma is a mishmash: porky but pretty, skanky but sexy, passive but cunning, fatly sly, poisonously innocent. She falls prey to the reptilian charms of the groaningly-named Dmitri Meatte (“Dmitri was one to fasten onto theories. Could be a strength, could be a weakness. Obviously, his sign was Capricorn.”), a sociopathic, closeted neo-Nazi waiter at the café Seigl frequents for “chess nights”. Alma then inveigles herself-in a flabby gambit to further endear herself to her hot/cold (like meat?) lover-into the scattered affections of her employer, attempts to insert herself in the role of a quasi-paramour. Seigl, writer of a widely-hailed Holocaust novel he feels shabbily phony about, assailed by self-doubt and loathing, responds with a sublimated, keening yearn to Alma’s oblique, emotionally opaque advances, smashing open a thriving hornet’s nest of interlocked, interlaced patterns of want, recrimination, of hatred, guilt and rancor.
There’s a shifty, slippery, slipshod absence of coherence to the cast’s respective characters: for example, the rickety disjuncture between S’s supposed age with his fussily professorial, anachronistic diction, which seems better suited to a Bellowesque old-timer than mutedly groovy intellectual urbanite. Here he is on page 5:

Women, even quite young women, had a disconcerting habit of falling in love with him. Or imagining love. He would not have minded so much if he himself were not susceptible to sexual longings as some individuals are susceptible to pollen even as others are immune.

And on page 75 (following his initial encounter with Alma):

He moved on. He didn’t want to make the girl more self- conscious than she already was. And he was hardly a man to speak to strange women in public places; he wasn’t a man who took much notice of other people, even sexually attractive females.

The character of Seigl is a trite amalgam, an embarrassing mish-mash of stereotypes: physically large and virile yet quaintly erudite; bearish but nimble; loquacious yet wittily wary; expansively reticent. And so on.
The character of Alma is likewise a trite amalgam: her knee-jerk racism ultimately a consequence of her spiritually bereft, hardscrabble background (racism as manifestation of reversed self-loathing). There’s a dull trounce to her vituperative anti-Semitic interior monologues, woefully reminiscent of Oates’s abortive attempt to penetrate the psyche of a serial killer in the abysmal Zombie. There’s also the labored metaphor of the Hellishness of her origins: the parallel, reductively simplistic symbolism of her tattoos with those of Holocaust victims; her own attendant, abundant victimization. She’s an emotionally starved, intellectually pinched tabula rasa.
The Tattooed Girl teems with red herrings-the role-reversals, the gnarled, snarled twists and turns, the risible deus ex machina of the denouement-all of which seem stalely tacked-on to the narrative’s tacky hoarding, its plodding prod. It comes across, sadly, as a computer-generated morality play. The book’s core concept-fumbled by Oates-is the degree to which we consistently, pathetically, and, at times, mortally misinterpret the profound candour, the hard-knuckled truth of our rampant emotional energy, its ferociously pitched, erratic tenor.
The Holocaust-so monolithically, dizzyingly vile-haunts us like ghosts haunt a house. I remember a now-deceased family friend-a death-camp-survivor-pointing out something while wearing a short-sleeved shirt: the shock of the tattooed numbers was raw as a slap. The crux, the crushing pivot, of the narrative of The Tattooed Girl is not only an authorial attempt to address the Holocaust as an irrefutable historical mass, but also to confront its absolute moral wrongness. Ultimately, Oates fails due to the titanic stringency of her subject, its annihilative intimacy.
Richard Harvor (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
When a reclusive, 38-year-old writer hires a near-illiterate young woman as an assistant at his suburban home in Carmel Heights, near Rochester, N.Y., he's unaware that a vehement anti-Semitism seethes beneath her tattoo-branded exterior. Renowned for The Shadows-his great early success, a novel based on his grandparents' experiences in Germany during the Holocaust-Joshua Seigl confuses his friends and sparks the anger of his hypomanic sister, Jet, when despite their objections he refuses to fire the young woman. A full portrait of the amiable, disillusioned Seigl emerges as he translates Virgil's The Aeneid, makes excuses for his failing health (he has recently been diagnosed with a debilitating nerve disease) and interacts erratically with his concerned friend, Sondra. Meanwhile, the mentally hollowed-out Tattooed Girl comes to seem a more realistic victim of persecution than any character in Seigl's historical fiction. Her soft, fleshy skin is defaced with ugly tattoos burned beneath her eye and on the backs of her hands by a mysterious group of abusive males. With scarcely a shred of self-esteem, she mumbles "Alma" to those who ask her name, "as if she had no surname. Or her surname wasn't important, as Alma herself wasn't important." She continually tries to impress her abusive, Jew-hating boyfriend, Dmitri, with little treasures stolen from her employer. Yet as she learns more about Seigl and his heritage, she can no longer ignore the dignity and respect with which he treats her. With her usual cadenced grace, Oates (We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; etc.) tells a mesmerizing, disturbing tale-though the little that is revealed of the Tattooed Girl's past may leave fans wanting more. Like the readers of Seigl's The Shadows, those who look for more meaning beneath the surface will be "forced to imagine what the writer doesn't reveal."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Oates's novel about an intellectual and his barely literate assistant provides a narrator with a huge built-in advantage: The central characters couldn't be more different. Joshua Seigl is an acclaimed 38-year-old writer in upstate New York who suffers from a mysterious degenerative illness. He hires Alma as his new assistant, projecting on her an idealized nobility that couldn't be further from the truth. The book shows people so locked into their own points of view that they are blind to the essence of others. Kate Fleming certainly delineates the two characters--who couldn't? Her Alma is affecting, barely verbal but never without a hint of menace. But Fleming ages Seigl far beyond his age in the book, causing listeners to continually do mental calibrations. M.O. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Leaves its Mark...
Joel Seigl is an award winning author of "The Shadows" who is suffering from a nerve disease. At the age of 38, believing that his life is over, he decides to hire an assistant to help him with his correspondence, his chores, and his life.

He goes through a series of interviews, hoping to find the perfect assistant. However, with each one he finds a fault. One is too chatty, another is too quiet. Seigl knows he needs someone to help him, especially as he is slowly dying. Letting someone into his personal space and through the shield that he has erected around himself seems almost too much to bear.

Then he meets Alma Busch at The Café and everything changes. Alma is "The Tattooed Girl." Swirls of tattoos, like writing, cover her skin and one large red tattoo, shaped like an insect, on her cheek. Alma also has a shield erected against the world. Her tattoos cause her to be the object of ridicule and impolite interest. She too knows how difficult it is to let that shield down and Seigl sees this. He hires her as his assistant, much to the surprise of others.

Why would a prize winning novelist pick such a person to be his assistant? Alma is frumpy, smells slightly sour and is emotionally disturbed. Then there are those tattoos; who did them to her? Who tattooed her body from head to toe? What secrets does she hide behind her blank eyes? Seigl does not wish to find out. He knows the value of secrets.

It is when Alma's racist boyfriend Dimitri begins to pimp her out to his friends that Alma takes a darker turn. She is turned against her employer because he is Jewish, brainwashed by Dimitri. She begins to plot ways to kill Seigl. Ground up glass in his food, slippery steps in the winter. There are many ways for someone to die and anyone can have an accident...

When I think of "The Tattooed Girl," I am reminded of an onion. Layer upon layer peeled away until you get to the centre. "The Tattooed Girl" and the characters within are like onions. There is more to them than first meets the eye. Seigl, Alma, even Seigl's abusive sister Jet who makes a little appearance in the book. None of these people are who they seem. I found my opinions of them changing through out the book, depending on what layer they were showing.

Oates has a talent for showcasing the darker side of human nature and in "The Tattooed Girl," she doesn't disappoint. There are some despicable people in this novel and some shocking things happen within it. What is interesting about "The Tattooed Girl" is that it's really a portrait of two people and how their attitudes towards one another go from hate to affection to love -showing that even the coldest of hearts can change.

This book shook something inside of me. It stayed with me longer than any other book so far this year and that's an amazing feat. The book is dark, somewhat depressing, twisted but one hell of an incredible read and poetically beautiful. Truly, Oates has created a masterpiece.

Subtle and enjoyable
As a rule I tend to avoid books that list their title and then have a colon and the words "A novel" afterwards. If the target readers aren't going to be able to figure out it is a novel without help from the title, I figure that it can't be all that good. I made the rare exception with this book, because I enjoyed "We Were the Mulvaneys" by Oates and this looked like it might be decent.

The central characters in the book are Joshua Siegel and Alma Busch, the tattooed girl from the title. Joshua is a well educated, famous writer and is an heir to millions. He is reclusive and somewhat absent-minded, but is well liked in the community. Alma Busch is from a lower class background and has been severely abused by the men in her life. The crude tattoos that cover her body are the result of an abusive incident somewhere in her past that is never quite detailed.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Joshua Siegel hires the tattooed girl as his personal assistant, and becomes increasingly dependent upon her due to a debilitating neurological disorder. Alma secretly despises her employer, steals small items from his house and puts things in his food. Eventually, they grow closer to one another.

The tattooed girl and Joshua live in the same house but inhabit two different worlds. Both are ignorant of each other's lives. Joshua thinks that the tattoos are birthmarks, and hasn't the slightest comprehension of the tattooed girl's history or her private life. On the other hand, the tattooed girl is only semi-literate and has been taught a vicious and ignorant anti-semitism by her boyfriend. Although Joshua is very attracted to the tattooed girl, differences in class and background make it impossible for him to contemplate a relationship with her. On the hand, Alma sees the abusive manner in which others treat her as their way of recognizing her. For her, Joshua's absentminded kindness is a form of weakness, and a sign of how he views her as less than a person.

Both characters are prone to act without really understanding why they act. For a brief period, Joshua's neurological disorder goes into remission and he enters a manic, euphoric state. The remission ends, and after a bad visit with his doctor, he tells the tattooed girl that he is disgusted with her chewing gum, not recognizing that he is venting because of his frustation over his physical state. One evening, Alma crushes a glass and puts it in the casserole she is serving. Then she spills it on Joshua and afterwards eats part of it herself.

"The Tattooed Girl" contains a subtle discourse on the holocaust. Joshua is famous for a book he wrote on the concentration camps, and the tattoos on his employee are linked to the numbers stitched into the skin of the victims of Auschwitz and Dachau. Joshua may be the child of a concentration camp survivor, but the book suggests that the tattooed girl is more the proper heir to that legacy.

I really enjoyed this book. The ending is a little weak and both characters are a bit stereotyped, but this is the first work by Oates that I have been able to finish since "We Were the Mulvaneys".

*Miss. O* O.K. I guess... *Miss. O*
In this novel by Joyce Carol Oates, an aging ex-prodigy and author is in need of assistance, and starts to (secretly) try to find an assistant. After going through several interviews, Joshua Seigl isn't happy with any of the possible candidates. Seigl gave up searching until he met Alma Busch in a bookstore. She seemed like a good person for the job; although it turns out she is illiterate. This book tells the tale of this mixed-matched pair from a third-person writing of each of their views on their lives - interaction with each other and others.

I suppose if I were older, this book might be more appealing, for the writing is good. It is a bit advanced I guess - that or the stress of finishing the book before a deadline - for my age because it felt difficult to read at times. I recommend this novel to older, more advanced-level-reading students, but not to younger, less advanced level students.

-- >> Kathy White