A few jabs – and one knockout

The Museum of Dr Moses

by Joyce Carol Oates

Quercus, 229pp, £14.99

JOYCE CAROL OATES IS AMONG the most prolific of authors. She writes, apparently, as unstoppably as other people chatter on the phone. Her first collection of short stories was published in 1963, and her first novel – announcing, as one critic has it, "her familiar themes of madness, violence and sexual passion" – the next year.

She has averaged more than a book a year since, while also writing plays, poetry and criticism and holding down a succession of academic posts.

This new book is a collection of stories. They mostly deal with relations between parents and children, fairly grisly relations. "Suicide Watch", for instance, tells of an encounter in the psychiatric ward of the Philadelphia House of Detention for Men between a prosperous businessman and his estranged druggy son whose partner and child have disappeared. The son tells the story of a night of horrific violence. Is his version true or mere fantasy? The father doesn't know what to believe. Nor does the reader. This one anyway.

"Bad Habits" is offered as the memories of one of three children whose father has been arrested and charged as a serial killer. They are, naturally enough, disturbed. So is their mother. She maintains that it's all a mistake. Some day the truth will out. But she doesn't believe it. All she is doing is erecting a defence against reality. The children don't believe it either. When they visit, the man in "the baggy prison uniform … appeared distracted, like one who wishes to return to watching TV". There is no explanation. There never is for such crimes.

The title story is macabre. It was first published in an anthology entitled "The Museum of Horrors". The narrator, Ella, is a school-teacher who left home because her mother favoured her alcoholic brother, and hasn't returned for several years. Then she learns that her mother has married again. The new husband, Dr Moses Hammacher, is old enough to be Ella's grandfather. Ella goes home. Her mother is pleased to see her but very nervous. Dr Moses is welcoming but sinister. He has opened a medical museum in his home. At night Ella enters the forbidden Red Room. Shades of Bluebeard, and possibly worse. We are in Hitchcock territory here, the Hitchcock of Psycho, and very entertaining it is, even if, as with Psycho, any suspended disbelief is short-lived.

By far the best piece in the book is the longest, a novella really, entitled "The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza". I read it first and then again last, because this is the real thing; in most of the other stories Oates is more like a gifted pianist improvising freely and not really, you think, expecting anyone to listen carefully (the characters are more than labels). But the novella is about believable people, and it rings true and is moving.

I confess to a prejudice in its favour, because I remember LaStarza, who was a very good heavyweight in the early 1950s. He fought Rocky Marciano twice, and many thought he won the first fight on points. In the second, for the title, he was knocked out in the 11th round when ahead on points. (Besides which, when I was a boy, I thought his name very romantic.)

Oates is well-known as a boxing fan, but the story isn't really about LaStarza but about his (fictional) opponent, Colum, an Irish heavyweight, a friend of the narrator's father and perhaps more than a friend of her mother. He is an undisciplined man of great charm, a fighter who has never quite made it. He sees the match with LaStarza, who has already lost his two fights with Marciano, as his chance to break into the big time. It is vividly and knowledgeably imagined. A little later Colum apparently shoots himself. No-one knows why. It is only in her father's old age that the narrator learns the truth.

This story is so good because the people in it are fleshed out, understood but not judged, and because Oates captures, beautifully and convincingly, the atmosphere of the early Fifties and of the seedy, crooked world of boxing.

In comparison, the other stories in the collection are make-weights. "The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza" shows just how good Oates can be when her imagination is fully engaged.