Writer: Joyce Carol Oates

If anyone pays attention to what I am writing here then they will know I really think highly of Joyce Carol Oates. This post counters some of my enthusiasm, parts from a review of Oates's latest novel from the London Review of Book under Popcorn and Stale Plush by Namara Smith.

For the best part of her six-decade career, there’s been a lingering suspicion that nobody who publishes as often as she does can have much worth saying. An aura of cheapness, or promiscuity, hangs over her work. Literary value is often synonymous with scarcity, and Oates has never made herself scarce. She made her name in the 1960s and 1970s with four violent, dreamlike novels known as the Wonderland Quartet. The third, them (1969), ended with an account of the Detroit riots of 1967, which Oates witnessed while teaching in the city. Writing in Harper’s in 1971, Alfred Kazin praised her openness to ‘social havoc and turbulence’ and her affinity with the ‘avalanche’ of the times. But five years later, she no longer seemed in touch with the zeitgeist. Hilton Kramer dismissed her novels in Commentary as the product of ‘a completely conventional mind’. His line on her work – it was written too quickly and there was too much of it – has been repeated over the years. Oates’s own position is simple: the more one writes, the better chance one has of producing something worthwhile. ‘It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones,’ she told the Paris Review in 1978. You should try, of course, to make every novel as good as it can be – but you have to be prepared to fail.

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The novels depend on similar moments of crisis – after one mask has shattered, before another has settled into place. Oates is interested in what she calls, in an essay on Mike Tyson, ‘the core of impersonality within the carefully nurtured and jealously prized “personality” with which we are identified, by ourselves and others’. The impersonal – another word that recurs across Oates’s novels – can be a source of freedom. In A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Clara, the daughter of migrant fruit pickers, meets a handsome drifter who helps her slip sideways into the darkness and become ‘a girl without any name’. Years later, settled, with a child and a man to support her, she is driving down a dusty country road and sees a man who reminds her of the drifter in the doorway of a gas station. They drive to the woods on the edge of town and together sink down to ‘that great dark ocean bed where there were no faces or names but only shadowy bodies you reached out to in order to calm yourself’. When she gets home, the ground beneath her feet is ‘solid and transformed’, and the happiness of her child in her arms feels like her own. Oates takes earthly delights seriously, and understands what they cost. She writes without pity or scorn about the drunk killing himself a bottle at a time, the gambler staking his life savings, the adulterer risking everything in a moment of lust – she knows the risk is part of the appeal.

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Oates takes full advantage of the licence afforded by fiction to speak in more than one voice and mean more than one thing. Blonde cuts implacably between romance and realism, between the dream world of the movies and the meat market. Oates does Monroe’s breathless coo but she can do the director, too, and the impersonal eye of the camera, holding the two in equipoise. She does male drag with relish, especially the swaggering, leering, slouch-hatted variety. (John Huston, watching Monroe walk away from her audition for The Asphalt Jungle: ‘Sweet Jesus. Look at the ass on that little girl, will you?’)....

And maybe it was my denseness but I did not see how these comments connected with the new novel. Probably not all that negative, either.

Going back, the Los Angeles Review of Books has The Ineluctable Agon of Desire: Joyce Carol Oates’s Suspense Fiction touching on Oates's horror, noir, and suspense stories. It includes this:

And through them all runs the theme Oates returns to forever: the transgressive force of erotic compulsion, the urge to possess and control, which is yet so close to surrender....

Oh boy, that subject, again. But one thing that has fascinated me about Oates is her hard-boiled attitude towards her characters even though her style is not hard-boiled. 

Literary Theory and Criticism has Analysis of Joyce Carol Oates’s Stories.

...Violence becomes an emphatic metaphor for the arbitrary hand of fate, destiny, chance, God—or whatever one wishes to call it. Oates generally portrays it without naming or quantifying it: For her, it is simply the way things are.

The (Other) You by Joyce Carol Oates reviews one of her short story collections.

One of her short stories, Subaqueous.

From her Master Class there is Joyce Carol Oates on the Importance of Reading for Writers.

The New York Review of Books has ‘See What You Can Make of It’, an interview. So does Tim Ferris here.

5 Short Story Ideas From Author Joyce Carol Oates

And for a bit of humor about Oates's output:  I Keep Losing Freelance Copywriting Gigs To Joyce Carol Oates

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2/3/22

Updated 2/21/22