Fridays are good days for me and they bear a good pattern for me. I had early class, then lounged around the engineering library catching up on homework or emails. I went to office hours for my computer programming class with a question, had a doughnut at the expense of the engineering honor society, stuck around for a few minutes, then went off on my own. I make time after 1 to watch my favorite campus acapella group, eat lunch on the grass, and then go into the library.
I usually read my National Geographic on Tuesdays, my Economist on Thursdays, saving McSweeney's for Fridays. Our main library has a grand collection of the McSweeney's quarterlies, and today, I had thirty minutes before discussion, and got the chance to read "Bad Habits," a strange, chilling short story by Joyce Carol Oates.
In senior year, I read "Three Girls" and decided that she was a hero of mine. She's obscenely prolific with her writing, and I almost skipped physics discussion to see her in our library. Almost.
"Bad Habits"
The narrator and her siblings are pulled out of school. Their father was arrested--he is a serial killer called Bad Habits, and the story is essentially a sketch of how his arrest, their family's reaction, and the media coverage change them. It's unsettling and suspenseful, and I am without words. One thing that immediately drew me in was the status of names. The children are referred to by initials until the trial date. The narrator remains anonymous, and the eldest child maddeningly searches for connections between her family and the victims.
Perhaps this is because I had math lecture just half an hour before reading, but I was reminded of some wisdom from my professor: "In mathematics and mythology alike, you must give your enemy a name."
In "Bad Habits," the characters begin only with labels and initials. The father is eventually identified (by his long full name, with initials B.H.) and then the siblings, and then an exhaustive list of the victims. The narrator, stated above, remains anonymous. Name thy enemy. Can we think of it as if she identifies her antagonists as they come? Following her father's arrest, the narrator and her siblings are subject to the neurotic overprotection of their mother, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. The family is a wreck, all because of her father. He is named first.
Secondly, her siblings become plagued with bad habits. Bad habits again. Their compulsions bleed into one another, and they become this writhing mess of unhappiness. Their community, their peers, and even their family members come to loathe them, and, I might guess, the narrator identifies them as enemies as well.
About the victims. The eldest sibling, in her fitfully obsessive paranoia, links each victim to a member of the family, by names, first letters of names, etc. Names again. Can it be that the father named his enemies within his family, and transferred that antagonism onto the people he killed?
That's enough for today. It can be read in McSweeney's 18, if you can find it. One day, I shall be rich enough for a subscription.
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