Joyce Carol Oates Interviewed

Here I confess to being a fan of Joyce Carol Oates. You will find my other posts concerning Ms. Oates here. Now Esquire has published At Home With Joyce Carol Oates in the wake of her publishing another collection of short stories.

Even “The Suicide,” a striking stream-of-consciousness piece midway through Zero that traces the conflicted inner monologue of a bipolar novelist who was once a celebrated wunderkind of modern lit, comes at its subject with a refreshing lack of reverence. Yes, Oates says, it was inspired by the late David Foster Wallace; no, she was not particularly a fan. “I didn’t know him at all, and the only story of his that I really like and teach is not at all like anything else he wrote, it’s only about two pages long,” she admits easily. “I'm just fascinated by other writers, by the voices that they construct and how they become, in some cases, trapped within them… But also I'm very sympathetic with that point of view—the suicide who can't bring himself to commit suicide because he hasn't written the perfect note. Because really, you wouldn't want to leave an inept suicide note, and you wouldn't want to not leave a note if you're a writer, you know?”

Elsewhere in the collection, Oates slips into the skins of both a high-strung graduate student slowly unraveling at an off-campus barbecue (in the title story’s fraught opening salvo) and a feral pack of teenage girls enacting their #MeToo revenge on a series of local grandees (“Mr. Stickum”). There are quiet, evocative little snippets of O. Henry heartache (“Sparrow,” “Take Me I Am Free”); more than one blithely absurd future dystopia (“MARTHE,” “This Is Not a Drill”); and an enjoyably bonkers slice of pure body horror (“Monstersister”) that nearly begs to be turned into a James Wan film. Not much connects them all, perhaps, beyond a certain stylistic élan, and Oates’ enduring predilection for pressing down on the tender squash-blossom bruises of the human condition.

“She is a novelist in the grand Victorian manner,” says Margaret Atwood, her similarly generative friend and comrade-in-arms of some 50 years. “If you think of Victor Hugo, Dickens, Tolstoy, Thackery—not the style or the subject matter, but the mission to show society in all its layers and permutations and combinations. They weren’t chiseling miniature portraits, they were doing scope. Some of her diversions are little adventures in the gothic, etcetera, but her main thing I think is the grand-picture novel.”  

And therein explains pretty much everything I find remarkable about Joyce Carol Oates – her range, her style, her tough-mindedness. 

Take a look at the whole of the interview, it brings out her charms.

This week, the Times Literary Supplement published A world beyond: Suburban life meets the fantastic in Rachel Ingalls’s fiction, a review written by Joyce Carol Oates. It may give you an insight into her non-fiction.

schn 8/4