Books: Hardscrabble Heroine

A GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS by Joyce Carol Oates. 440 pages. Vanguard. $5.95.

It sometimes struck Clara that her name had nothing to do with her at all. She felt that it was an ugly, stupid name, and if only she had a prettier one—say, Marguerite—some of her yearnings would be satisfied. Not that Clara was ever exactly sure what she was yearning for. Born in a flatbed truck on a muddy Arkansas highway, brought up in a series of squalid, lice-infested migrant labor camps, Clara simply suffered from a painfully tugging notion that life was a nasty, frightening dream, and that somehow, some day, she would wake up.

Poor and yearning little girls are standard fixtures in hardscrabble literature. Most of them, like little Clara Walpole, scheme and claw their way up from a knockabout childhood and finally wear silk dresses and live in the biggest house for miles around. But if Clara seems to be a drearily familiar type, there is a magical naturalistic quality in this book that makes her one of the most pathetically provocative literary heroines of the year.

Legerdemain of this sort is the special talent of 29-year-old Joyce Carol Oates. As she demonstrated in an earlier novel (With Shuddering Fall) and two volumes of short stories (By the North Gate, Upon the Sweeping Flood), she is a literary oddity. An upstate New York Yankee, she creates countrified characters who burn with the kind of short-fused violence and curious pride of privacy that have always been the exclusive hallmark of writers from the South.

In A Garden of Earthly Delights, she takes Clara from the filth and mis ery of migrant camps through a period as a shopgirl and finally into avaricious and vindictive middle age. Devoured by love for the men in her life and, in turn, obsessively devouring her weak bastard son, Clara eventually drifts into madness rather than give up her fierce search: "If nobody gives me what I want, I'll steal it. I want somethin'—I'm goin' to get it." Only in the last 50 or 60 pages of the book does the author loosen the string of tension that she has drawn, and the story turns unnecessarily melodramatic. In the end, what promises to be one of the most acridly realistic novels since Dreiser never quite takes the prize.