Fourth Estate £16.99 pp320

Joyce Carol Oates’s 31st novel is an exhausting affair: a slew of feverishly written, slyly suggestive prose that takes in violent prejudice, the Holocaust and its victims, remembrancers and deniers, sadomasochism and neurological disaster. At its close, the reader is forced to wonder what kind of imagination could have conjured up such an ingenious stew of miseries to entrap and torture its creations, which, given the novel’s primary subject matter, is in all likelihood precisely Oates’s point.

Joshua Seigl is a 38-year-old scholar cast in the Nabokovian mould, made rich by inherited wealth and by a million-copy-selling novel that he published as a young man. The Shadows, inspired by his father’s retelling of the family’s experiences in the Nazi concentration camps (stories that rendered him a “posthumous” being, who “moved like a ghost among living human beings, a wraith out of Hades”), now excites in Seigl a deep ambivalence. As a mysterious physical condition similar to multiple sclerosis progresses, and his nerves begin, literally, to fray at the edges, he experiences the connection to his ancestors as a wearying, cumbersome tie: “I am not my father,” he reflects. “I am scarcely myself.”

Allied to his rigid, rigorous intellectual amour-propre is Seigl’s careful and almost neurotic husbandry of that self. Private to the point of repudiating the world, his social and sexual relationships strictly controlled, his material surroundings dictated by apparently chaotic but deeply personal criteria, he is in thrall, Oates is at pains to point out, to the life of the mind. As his body fails, his isolation is breached; by a combination of chance circumstances and fateful whimsy, he hires as an assistant Alma Busch, a young woman of mysterious background and apparently limited intelligence.

Alma, the tattooed girl of the title, bears wispy, spidery marks on hands, cheek and neck, the result of an unexplained assault by a group of men; elsewhere, she is figured as “a female mollusc” by the sadistic waiter Dmitri Meatte, who rescues her in order to abuse and then prostitute her, and to indulge and punish his own horrified fascination with her pale, fleshy body and its face, “round and boneless as pulpy bread dough”. Once she is installed in Seigl’s mansion he can also indoctrinate her with his crude, confused loathing of the Jews, whom he variously believes to be architects of their own destiny (“When certain kinds of things happen to a race you have to wonder why, don’t you?”), perpetrators of a grand hoax, cowardly, conniving and grasping. Alma, infatuated and obsessional, willingly assumes Dmitri’s attitudes and augments them in a particularly stylised, lurid mode that reaches its apex when she smears her menstrual blood into Seigl’s boeuf bourguigonne. As Alma and Seigl proceed, in a state of almost complete misunderstanding of each other’s motives and private thoughts, the pressure of suppressed emotion contributes to the novel’s claustrophobic and hectic atmosphere.

Oates herself seems to apprehend the effect that this melodramatic, portentous staging has on her story; even Seigl, at one point, appreciates that he is caught up in a farce. The novel’s tone veers, accordingly, between restrained irony and high campery, as when Seigl’s mentally unstable and hysterical sister Jet makes her unhinged appearances, and between heightened poetic imagery and a voice far more prosaic. The Tattooed Girl reads as if much fury and fervour has been thrown at it, but its near-pathological overwriting makes it hard to discern precisely what lasting truths about the nature of bigotry and victimhood and the power of civilisation to counter them it conveys.

Available at the Books First price of £13.59 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• If you only buy one book this Christmas make sure it's...
• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Gifts
• 10 Books Not To Read Before You Die