And the Point Is?

I am a fan of Joyce Carol Oates but for the life of me, I can't figure out the point of her latest short story, titled "Landfill," which was published in the October 9 issue of The New Yorker. It is categorized as fiction but according to a Letter to the Editor published in the October 23 issue, it appears to be based on an actual event. I'll get to that later.

A brief synopsis: "Landfill" recounts the story of Hector Campos, Jr. of Southfield, MI, , a 19-year-old college student at Michigan State University who is reported missing by his dorm mates in late March. To make a short story even shorter, his remains are found in the Tioga County landfill. But it was well-known that Hector had a proclivity for getting drunk at frat parties and one night, he crossed the line into a drunken stupor and some other drunken frat boys, as a joke, pushed his body down a garbage chute into a dumpster. They claimed they checked the dumpster later that evening but that Hector had somehow vanished. How he ended up in the Tioga County landfill is anyone's guess.

Are you still with me?

If a fiction writer wants to engender sympathy from readers for a particular character, he or she should create qualities in said character that are, um, sympathetic. I read through seven pages of this story and could find no good reason why I should feel waves of compassion for this boy. In fact, the mood of this whole story was about as inviting as a well, a landfill.

Hector, or Scoot as his friends called him, was a mediocre student at best. He would attend his engineering classes either hung over or if sober, thinking about the next frat party.

As far as acceptance into his fraternity Phi Epsilon goes, he and several other pledges were accepted merely to "fill out the membership." Even if he was aware of this fact, he desperately wanted to fit in somewhere.

A girl he had been planning to take to a frat party sent him an email that "something's come up." "Bitch," he thinks to himself, "I knew I couldn't trust her."

His roommates barely tolerated him. When interviewed about Scoot's disappearance, the words and phrases that pop up are "uninteresting," "drunk like an asshole," and a reference to the fact that he, when drunk, would "piss on the toilet seat and the floor and the next day act like it's some goddam joke." So far, I am not feeling the love here.

His relationship with his parents wasn't much better. His extremely over-protective mother would text message and call him on his cell phone constantly. He would erase the messages. His contact with his father in the story is merely illustrated by an urgent request to send money so that he can pledge the frat house.

Scoot's death, while tragic, is anti-climactic. While we are shown the mother's grief and introspection, we are never introduced to any friends from high school, neighbors, cousins, former girlfriends, ANYONE who can offer a glimpse into the life of this kid. He didn't even seem to have a best bud. No pets. Gosh, even the other annoying, drunken frat boys found him annoying. What made him special and, more importantly, why did I just wade through seven pages of this story, waiting for the other shoe to drop?

Getting back to the my point in the first paragraph. Mandee Wilton from Ringoes, NJ (I always loved the name of that town!), writes a letter chastising Oates for characterizing her story as fiction when it so closely resembles real-life events. In her letter, she notes that the story "uses nearly the exact dates, times, descriptions, and scenarios" from a traumatic story of a young man from the College of New Jersey who disappeared this past March and whose body was found later in a landfill. She points out other similarities between the fictional character and the real one; for example, both were 19 and were named for their fathers. Wilton feels that Oates could have, ''Just as easily created a fictional piece of her own, rather than incorporating such significant details...from a well-known, real-life tragedy."

As a writer, I disagree. Since Man has been writing on cave walls, he has taken events from real life and made them into fictional works. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, providing enough details are changed. I, for one, get a lot of my ideas for my work from newspaper stories. The real creativity comes from getting inside the characters' heads and creating a persona plus being able to create a captivating, compelling story line.

I don't think Oates did that here. If she borrowed from real life, fine. However, the question remains, why did she borrow someone so mediocre and boring? If Hector Campos, Jr., was portrayed as a mean, rotten sonofabitch who kicked kittens and cursed at his mother and who everyone hated with a passion, that would have made for a far more interesting read. Instead, he comes off as just another drunken, boring frat boy, not even as remotely interesting as Flounder from "Animal House."