My Sister, My Love

My Sister, My Love is Joyce Carol Oates’s 2008 novel, a fictionalized take on the JonBenet Ramsey case retold through the perspective of a young man whose six year old sister was a national figure skating prodigy before she was murdered in their basement on Christmas night. The book is dense, dark, and unsparing, even by Oates’s high standards for those qualities. The narrator, Skyler Rampike, is nineteen years old when he writes the manuscript that makes up the novel, and he is trying to make sense of an event that destroyed his family and turned his sister Bliss into the property of every cable news network and tabloid in the country.

Oates uses the Rampike family as a vehicle for a wider critique of American celebrity culture, suburban ambition, the pharmaceutical industry, evangelical television, and the long ugly history of the country’s appetite for the misery of pretty white children. Skyler’s narration is fragmented, footnoted, and stylistically demanding, with whole sections written in different formats including talk show transcripts, parental press conferences, and the breathless prose of supermarket magazine reporting. The technique is not always easy to read but it serves the novel’s purposes.

What makes the book more than just a fictionalized true crime exercise is Skyler himself. Oates is one of the great writers of damaged young men in American fiction, and Skyler’s voice is rendered with the kind of psychological precision that earns the four hundred plus pages of his attempt to tell the story. He is angry, he is grieving, he is on multiple medications, and he is the only one left who can speak for his murdered sister.

For readers who can handle the material and the prose style, My Sister, My Love is one of Oates’s most morally serious late novels. It is not for every reader. It is a book that takes the worst things and refuses to look away from them.