Grumpiness & It's Not All Politics Induced (Part 6) Why Read Joyce Carol Oates

The echocardiogram did a number on me. I have to admit that. This morning, I woke grumpy from stiffness and achiness. 

I made a trip to the convenience store for cigarettes and caffeine. Then I started on the email. 

First stop, the Los Angeles Review of Books. Two things I like about LARB. It is not as stodgy as the New York Review of Books without sacrificing a quality of writing, and it is free.

Joyce Carol Oates is a genius.

I think Joyce Carol Oates has more steel in her spine than most male American writers. More than I do. She does not she shy away from the debilitating effects of class in American life. I only wish I could do the same; I remain too cynical to be anything but absurdist in my outlook. She does not make violence romantic. 

And here is my proof of what I say: Harry Stecopoulos's review of Oates latest novel, The Hidden Injuries of Class, from The Los Angeles Review of Books. 

For all that, Fox still deserves serious and widespread attention. Oates has taken a challenging topic and used it as the basis for a small-town mystery of great aesthetic innovation and rich social implications. Formally speaking, this plot-driven narrative of violence and detection showcases her skill at sketching a range of different figures: Francis Harlan Fox, of course, the villainous protagonist, but also his female students and their parents, police detectives, blue-collar townspeople, even a small dog. Oates’s powerfully evocative language proves central to this vibrant characterization. Consider her description of a dying working-class woman’s breath as “smelling like damp pennies in the palm of a hand,” or her account of how attempting to educate an unresponsive female student “was like trying to communicate with uncooked bread dough.” From structure to style, Oates’s novel provides a master class in the aesthetics of fiction.

Her thematic chops are no less impressive. Readers familiar with Oates’s work will hardly be surprised by her interest in difficult narratives of sexual assault. She has often published fiction centered on the vulnerability and abuse of girls and young women—consider the fate of Connie in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” (1966), Maureen Wendall in them (1969), and Marianne Mulvaney in We Were the Mulvaneys (1996). But Oates’s fiction has focused equally on how problems of class impact those better-known quasi-gothic themes. Unusually sensitive to material advantage and privation—hardly hot topics among contemporary US novelists—Oates rarely misses an opportunity to explore how a character’s socioeconomic position shapes their behavior and their experience. For her, gender and sexuality are the modalities in which class is lived, and the struggle to survive, let alone thrive, under capitalism often emerges most palpably, most terribly, in the pain inflicted on young female subjects.

Importantly, Oates recognizes that, in the United States, violence against women is hardly confined to working-class contexts. Her National Book Award–winning novel them understands Maureen Wendall’s vulnerability to sexual assault in light of her urban poverty and near-constant exposure to violent men. Her stepfather attacks her, and she later labors as a sex worker on the streets of Detroit. But the bestseller We Were the Mulvaneys takes a different approach. In this novel, Marianne, the daughter of an affluent family, is assaulted by the son of her father’s rich friend. Her attack doesn’t so much confirm as precipitate a crisis in the family’s economic position; as the plot unfolds, the Mulvaneys’ fortunes decline.

She sets a mark we writers should try to hit. We won't, but it is the effort that matters. Therein is why I deplore the thumbsuckers, they who would not try and whine about how the world is against them. They see only a woman's name, not the quality of work being done by a woman.

By now, I am tired, and the grumpiness is slipping away. This review even made me feel good.

(There is also a pleasing review of Lonesome Dove under We Killed the Right Animal)

sch 8/2