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

sch 

2/3/22

Updated 2/21/22

Joyce Carol Oates' We Were The Mulvaneys 3/27/2015

[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 10/14/2025]  

With having read so little Joyce Carol Oates, I think you might question the effect she has on me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Hardy have also hit me as hard. She makes me wish I'd kept writing fiction — as does all the other three. At the same time, Oates makes me wonder if I can ever write as well as she does — like Marquez. Her tales of western New York surprise and encourage me. Surprising me by setting them not in the more glamorous cities, like Jonathan Franzen. But small towns like Hardy and William Faulkner. Encouraging me with my own stories of no — where Indiana. She chills how she handles the most horrible of events (here: the rape of a sixteen-year-old girl) without flinching or overplaying the event in melodrama. Is this not Art? Is not this steadiness to be found in Oedipus Rex and Anna Karenina? Surprisingly, the prison's leisure library has more of her books (three, I seem to recall). I put them on the next reading list.

While reading We Were The Mulvaneys (Plume, 1997), I thought of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. There the gets raped, mutilated, and murdered; father executes his revenge. Therein lies the tragedy. In Oates' novel, the father cannot execute his revenge; society protects the rapist. The father and sons dwindle through impotence. The daughter, sent away, becomes figuratively mutilated and somewhat dead. The family splinters. Only when the father dies — away from the family but after reconciling with his daughter — does the family begin to heal. I see now what We Were The Mulvaneys shares with Franzen's The Corrections is the changing role and ineffectiveness of the American patriarch and the family. Oates has in her novel characters in some state of healing. Not a “Hollywood ending” but a hopeful one.

Tough, serious-minded, and the hardest novel I've read for a while. Oates made me think too much of my own life, my own family. I am actually looking forward to War and Peace. 

Why is there not the same touting of Joyce Carol Oates for the Nobel as there is for Philip Roth?

I want to leave with a sample of Oates' writing. The problem is one of selection — length, its durability as a quotation, are troublesome here. She packs tightly.

So in the end Mike did walk his ravaged old rubbery-legged dad up the filth-encrusted stairs to the furnished room above the Golden Pavilion Chinese Pavilion and Takeout. The pigsty room you wouldn't want to examine too closely. Poor Mike biting his lower lip, nostrils pinching. He pulled off his dad's laceless shoes, a few items of dirt-stiffened clothing, laid him onto the stained rumpled sheets where at once he began to snore, snort, wheeze, his head lolling like the head of a broken-necked goose. Waking a long time later to discover only six twenty-dollar bills stuffed in his pants pocket — a hundred twenty when he'd had a wild hope of five hundred at least. So the ravaged old man had humbled himself in the eyes of his eldest son and in his own eyes for so little, after all.

sch

[Checking out the internet for the information denied me in prison, I found the following items.

JCO has a Substack! Joyce Carol Oates: A Writer's Journal.

We Were The Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates (Book Snob, 3/17/2011) has a different reaction than mine:

I could write more about what happens, but I can’t be bothered to, which sounds dreadful, but that’s how the book made me feel by the end. There was so much detail, so many interwoven stories…and it was all rather unbelievable. While there are precursors to what happens in the pasts of Corinne and Michael, from the way they are described at the beginning, their actions are just not convincing for their characters. I didn’t believe that the people they were described as being would possibly act in that way. Judd is a rather weak narrator; Oates doesn’t seem quite sure what she’s doing with him, and digs into the minds and hearts of other characters in a way Judd could not possibly have done. How could he know in minute and graphic detail, what his brother was feeling or thinking at a particular time, for example?

On top of that, it’s a heavy book, with allegorical and Biblical overtones; the setting in Mt Ephraim is, I’m sure, deliberate, and the failures of fathers and betrayals of sons and so on and so forth, as well as the frequent mentions of religion and forgiveness and atonement etc, all gave it a weight that the flimsy story could not carry. It started out very promisingly, but it ran away with itself and became far too complicated and convoluted. The essential themes of the rupturing of the myth of the all American family; the questioning of the appearance of perfection; the ease at which families can be torn apart, by any number of seemingly trivial reasons that trigger a fault line already there, under the surface, are all excellent, and intriguing, and promised a great deal. Ultimately, however, I felt Oates tried to be too clever; to introduce too many strands; to say too much. The trite, twee ending was the final nail in the coffin. To give her due credit, her writing is wonderful, and I stayed with the book regardless of my doubts because her prose is so good, and drew me in despite the weakness of the tale she was spinning. As such, I haven’t been put off trying her again, as other reviews suggest this is not her best work, and I’m sure another one of her books might strike a better chord with me. Has anyone got any recommendations?

There are 41 comments, I scanned several, and they are interesting.

booksnob is now a Substack.

Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys (John Pistelli, 2022) has interesting things to say.

The old questions: “How good is Joyce Carol Oates?” and, given an oeuvre so vast, “Where can you begin to find out?” These questions have been reinvigorated in recent years. Oates’s reputation had always been precarious, marred by a critical suspicion of her copiousness and of her bestseller-adjacent tastes and interests. It seems to have crested in the 1980s and ’90s—that Toni Morrison usurped Oates’s Nobel Prize was the opinion of even one distinguished black novelist, Charles Johnson—and then to have waned in the 2000s. But in the last decade, and especially in the last few months, thanks to the controversial film of her Marilyn Monroe novel and to a sideline in Twitter shitposting almost as accomplished as that of the former president she so abhors, Oates has seemed to stand at the apex of her vanishing generation. After the deaths of Updike, Roth, Morrison, and Didion, and amid the more sibylline reticence of her remaining peers (Ozick, McCarthy, DeLillo, Pynchon), isn’t she the last lioness of American literature?

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But this summary of male violence and female victimization makes the novel sound more agenda-driven than it is, when in fact it is less didactic than Roth’s book. In Oates’s fiction as on her notorious Twitter feed, we encounter an exoteric politics at odds with an esoteric aesthetics. She is officially a feminist, but her criticism hints that she finds the classic female domestic novel insipid, is bored by the enlightened domestics Austen and Eliot, and considers herself the heir to fanatic, fascistic Dostoevsky and Lawrence. As in Dostoevsky, her characters seethe and roil, actuated by unconscious manias and half-uttered desires; as in Lawrence, she sets the human drama in its natural frame, amid animal heat, stony cliffs, sucking bogs, killing winds, as if to say that we are a part of nature—of its hideous violence as of its pastoral beauty or poetic sublimity—and shouldn’t fool ourselves otherwise. One of Judd’s earliest visions is of a doe chased by a pack of hounds: rape rising right out of the earth. 

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Why, then, the controversy about whether or not she’s a good writer—even leaving aside the irrelevant question of how much she writes or of the popular-feminine genres she often favors? Bluntly put, the relevant problem is the prose. We find no fine writing, no will-to-style, no singular voice in Oates (neither in this book nor in any other work of hers that I’ve read): nothing like Updike’s lyric pointillism, Roth’s eloquent rage, Morrison’s scriptural orature, DeLillo’s mediatic staccato, McCarthy’s Biblical cadence, Didion’s knowing minimalism. Instead, there are clichés and imprecisions and redundancies, my favorite being an early reference to “animals and fowl,” as if the latter category were not included in the former. There are exclamation points, italics, interjections, sentence fragments, strangely-deployed quotation marks—all adding up to an urgent anti-style. I am ungenerously reminded of the apocryphal line about the similarly astylistic Dreiser: he had no talent, only genius. It is in retrospect bizarre—truly an instance of racial ideology—that anyone suspected the Swedish Academy of choosing Morrison over Oates for the 1993 Nobel Prize on the grounds of “political correctness” when I imagine that even a Swedish translation must convey which of the two writers is the exceptional stylist, the poet of prose.

Oates accomplishes her fiction’s very real emotional effect with sheer accretion and insistence; the novel is like the wind that batters High Point Farm, a constant unglamorous roar insinuating itself through the walls of your mind. Her major characters—in this novel, the fluttery and formidable Corinne, “Protestant to her fingertips,” is a particularly glorious creation—seem hacked with a claw hammer out of stone. This, too, is an inheritance of Dostoevsky and Lawrence, as well as of Charlotte Brontë, one of the few writers named in this impressively un-literary novel. I think it is a legitimate way to write fiction, if superficially less commanding than the line-by-line vigor of a Morrison. For these anti-poetic writers, the novelist uses language to surpass language, to strike through to the core of reality—psychological, natural, and spiritual reality—over which language decorously draws its ornamented veil. 

 I would not draw a comparison to Dreiser. There is a point here that I did not see ten years ago: the effects created by sheer accretion. But Oates works more nimbly than Dreiser — in my opinion, and you determine the worth of that. I like Dreiser — even though I fear his style adhering to my own. He lacks the cutthroat eye of Oates. Well, maybe not in An American Tragedy. This feels like quibbling, so I will go on.

Review: We Were the Mulvaneys  (The Literary Omnivore, 2009) makes a point I had not seen elsewhere, one that I do not recall, but may need to be added here. I do recall one character's arc, the son, did seem dull.

Oates’ aggressively leisurely pace can drag at times, but it’s also useful for playing up suspense, mostly in the parts of the novel dealing with Marianne. It can be hard to care about Judd, our narrator, when the stories of the rest of his family are much more interesting–the lion’s share of his involvement in the main story is intertwined with Patrick’s story. Oates, like the best of mothers, devotes equal time to all the Mulvaneys. I will readily admit to flipping ahead to check where Marianne or Patrick were at any given point.

And there I will close out this post.

sch 10/14/2025.] 

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

Joyce Carol Oates

Anyone who was in any of the Fort Dix FCI writing groups with me knows I am a fan of Joyce Carol Oates. I only knew some of her essays in The New York Review of Books before my incarceration. After reading We Were the Mulvaneys, I started reading all I could get into my hands.

In We Were the Mulvaneys, I finally saw an alternative to William Faulkner - how to use one's home territory when there were no great historical events. What to do when the home territory was an Indiana factory town.

Now let me direct you Ms. Oates being interviewed:  15 Famous Authors Ask Joyce Carol Oates Anything. This maybe the most surprising:

STEPHEN KING: What’s the scariest short story you’ve ever read?

OATES: The most truly terrifying reading experience of my life came when I was very young, and it was without a doubt Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass—particularly the final chapter. How bizarre that this ontologically disruptive work of fiction is considered a children’s book. The grotesqueries and scarcely disguised horrors—madness, murderousness, dementia, cannibalism, physical distress—of Lewis’s great work have certainly entered my unconscious, residing in its most remote and impregnable underground cavern, established at a time when I was 8 years old, when the phenomenon of “memory” was new. As an adult, I’ve encountered many unnerving works of literature that linger in the memory and resurface in times of unease or weakness. Odysseus’s visit to the underworld, though obviously fantastic, seems to the reader utterly realistic, plausible, and terrifying in its matter-of-factness. We are led to think, “Yes, the afterlife would be exactly like this: a sort of endless bad dream on the verge of dementia.” Nothing is more terrifying than [Anton] Chekhov’s short story “Ward No. 6,” although Chekhov’s “The Black Monk” is a close second. A third, long story of Chekhov’s unnerved me so much that I stopped reading it and have even forgotten the title. (It’s a little-known story about an elderly man of some distinction in a loveless marriage and surrounded by people for whom he feels little more than contempt; if you ask what is terrifying about this story, it’s the loss of spirit, meaning, clarity, the will to live, and sanity that Chekhov tracks so pitilessly.) The most terrifying works of fiction are likely to be realistic, even domestic, not galvanized by the supernatural, fantastic, or “action.” When I first saw your question, for a moment I thought you were asking what story of mine is the scariest. That would be “Big Momma,” in The Doll-Master [2016], a story so horrific that, had I not written it, I could not have finished reading it.

I got to listen to part of this YouTube interview. Her voice surprised me. Her advice to revise and revise did not surprise.

This discusses her Twitter activity. I have not signed up for Twitter, so check out her feed or not, but it gives the sense she operates on her own frequency. Anyone reading her would not be surprised at that.

And I cannot get podcasts in this halfway house, so I have not been able to check out Podcast #44: Joyce Carol Oates on Inspiration and Obsession.

But this is pure text - Literary icon Joyce Carol Oates offers a glimpse into her inner world:

When asked "Why do you write fiction?" Flannery O'Connor answered, "Because I'm good at it." I wonder if you identify with this response or would you have a more nuanced answer?

"I think Flannery O'Connor would have been really good at Twitter. She has all these wonderful one-liners… and she's not afraid to be funny. I don't think most people who are writers or artists really feel that they're good at it. I feel that most of us are trying and we're sometimes failing and dissatisfied and exasperated…"

"In just one morning I can have a gamut of emotions, from despair and despondency to mild curiosity over where this is going. I think that we all tell stories — our species is a storytelling species. And we love to tell stories, and we love to hear stories. So a writer or artist is someone who takes that impulse a little farther. I think there are many reasons we write or create art. Some of them are conscious and I think many of them are unconscious…"

And she teaches a MasterClass. 

She should have gotten the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you have not read her, you should be doing so ASAP.

Scariest Joyce Carol Oates Story

I do not recall reading any of Oates' fiction before this short story. She shocked me with her straightforwardness towards the terrible. Ab out a decade later, having read even more of her, I still find her approach to the terrible puts authors like Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy to shame. And what is it that all lives share but the terrible event that breaks hearts and minds, that transgresses the peace we want in our lives, the scarring event we carry forward until our deaths?

A Summary and Analysis of Joyce Carol Oates’ ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’:

‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ is a 1966 short story by the American writer Joyce Carol Oates. It is regarded by many critics as Oates’ best story, and is widely studied and praised for its treatment of some of the darker aspects of early 1960s America.

First published in the literary journal Epoch in 1966, ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ was inspired by a series of real-life murders and dedicated to Bob Dylan, whose song ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ was another inspiration on the story.

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In the last analysis, ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ is a powerful – one might almost say archetypal – exploration of the confusion, uncertainty, and hesitation that attend on adolescence, as young people, and especially young girls in this regard, negotiate the difficult path from girlhood to womanhood. We might call this ‘rite of passage’ or ‘coming of age’, but Oates’ story, given the dark true events that inspired it, is unsettling because it implies that coercion and threats are not only usual but perhaps even necessary, at least in a patriarchal society, to wrest indecisive young girls over that threshold. 

What greater horror show is there other than a clear-eyed look at our existence? 

The Narrative has an online library which has several of Joyce Carol Oates' short stories (not the one mentioned above) and non-fiction pieces here. Check them out and see what you think.

sch 11/28

How Joyce Carol Oates Does It - And the Line Between Fiction and Reality

 If anyone searches this blog for Joyce Carol Oates, they will find many references. She opened my eyes, she amazes me.

Jesse Lee Kercheval's Talking to Joyce Carol Oates on the Way to the Airport About Fiction’s Blurry Borders may answer my question of how Ms. Oates writes so much:

Once I had to give Joyce Carol Oates, who’d read at the university where I taught, a ride to the airport. As I drove, we talked, but she also had a yellow legal pad open on her knee, writing. I remember thinking she was taking notes, that maybe the right way to be sure you knew what had really happened in your life was to write it down. But when we stopped for a red light, I peeked at the pad and what she was writing had nothing to do with the drive or our conversation. It seemed to be part of story. I thought, So that is how she writes so many books! I decided she had an unusual brain. 

I endorse the last sentence without having met Ms. Oates.

As for fiction's fuzzy borders, that is actually Ms. Kercheval's story and should be read in full. She is a delight in her own way.

sch 3/13

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

One More Joyce Carol Oates Post

 The New Yorker did another profile of JCO, Joyce Carol Oates’s Relentless, Prolific Search for a Self, combining a lot of biography and discussion of her work. 

What I found is perhaps an explanation of how she is so productive:

In the midst of writing a novel, Oates sometimes felt so powerful—as if singled out—that she was startled when she passed store windows and saw her small, ordinary reflection. She made use of any stretch of free time, plotting the end of a novel while she was getting a cavity filled, or writing in the car on the way to book events. If her writing was going well, she didn’t want to stop (“one image, pursued, exhausted, then begets another”), and if it was going badly she also didn’t want to stop, because she needed to “get through the blockade, or around it, over it under it, any direction!—any direction, in order to live.” (After a few hours away from her desk, revising felt “as if one is coming home.”) Her friend Emily Mann told me, “I’ve seen her, in the middle of a party, check out, and I think, She’s just written a chapter.” To waste time made her feel “slithering, centerless,” she wrote in her journal, “a 500-pound jellyfish unable to get to this desk.” Oates was friends with Susan Sontag, who had a busy social life, and after the two spent time together in New York City Oates told her, “In some respects, I am appalled by the way you seem to be squandering your energy.” She reminded Sontag that “the pages you perfect, day after day,” will be the “means by which you define your deeper and more permanent self.”

It is nice to know she has been on the Nobel List, that she does not take it as seriously as some, I find charming.

By 1979, Oates was on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize, according to the Washington Post, and since then she has been rumored to be on the shortlist several more times. One year, she was told that she was the runner-up; another year, the book-review editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, acting on incorrect information, informed her that she had won. “I’m sorry that Daddy was disappointed—again!—by the Nobel Prize,” Oates wrote her parents in 1993. “I think, over all, it might be better not to be concerned about it; at least, we don’t have to discuss it.”

Finally, a discussion of her approach to American violence:

Her fiction often dramatizes grisly news headlines, involving kidnappings, serial killings, disappearances, and rapes, prompting so many questions about her preoccupation with violence that she felt compelled to publish an essay in the Times criticizing this line of inquiry. “The question is always insulting,” she wrote. “The question is always ignorant. The question is always sexist.” Her fiction, she explained, was simply reflecting the cruelty in our world. “We seem to have inherited, along with its two or three blessings, the manifold curse of psychoanalysis: the assumption that the grounds of discontent, anger, rage, despair—‘unhappiness’ in general—reside within the sufferer rather than outside of him.”

I think if the subject disturbs others, it is in how Oates does not romanticize violence. She serves it up directly and coldly. She has put me on edge when I read The Falls. This reaction is not one I had with any of Cormac McCarthy's novels. I hope that I can emulate her approach. I have known violence, I have been in the midst of violence, and I do not think romanticizing it is morally proper.

sch 11/26

Updated 2/5/2024: all of my Joyce Carol Oates posts.

Feeding My Ongoing Joyce Carol Oates Idolatry

The Paris Review unleashed its Joyce Carol Oates, The Art of Fiction No. 72 (1978) today. If you have not been following me, you can find my other posts on Joyce Carol Oates here. My notes follow.

One issues that has dogged her reputation all these years:

INTERVIEWER

We may as well get this one over with first: You're frequently charged with producing too much.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones—just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one. Each book as it is written, however, is a completely absorbing experience, and feels always as if it were the work I was born to write. Afterward, of course, as the years pass, it's possible to become more detached, more critical.

I really don't know what to say. I note and can to some extent sympathize with the objurgatory tone of certain critics, who feel that I write too much because, quite wrongly, they believe they ought to have read most of my books before attempting to criticize a recently published one. (At least I think that's why they react a bit irritably.) Yet each book is a world unto itself and must stand alone, and it should not matter whether a book is a writer's first, or tenth, or fiftieth.

In the following, the rising out of parochialism and the iamgery of the collapsing bridge are food for thought; particularly the former in these days of Trump.

INTERVIEWER

Do you find emotional stability is necessary in order to write? Or can you get to work whatever your state of mind? Is your mood reflected in what you write? How do you describe that perfect state in which you can write from early morning into the afternoon?

OATES

One must be pitiless about this matter of “mood.” In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function—a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind—then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally I've found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes . . . and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so. Joyce said of the underlying structure of Ulysses—the Odyssean parallel and parody—that he really didn't care whether it was plausible so long as it served as a bridge to get his “soldiers” across. Once they were across, what does it matter if the bridge collapses? One might say the same thing about the use of one's self as a means for the writing to get written. Once the soldiers are across the stream . . . 

This makes take pause about my own working habits - as I backfill the missing parts of "Love Stinks". More time is being spent now on organizing than on converting paper to bytes!

OATES

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer. Sometimes I work on two novels simultaneously, though one usually forces the other into the background. The rhythm of writing, revising, writing, revising, et cetera, seems to suit me. I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all. My next novel, Unholy Loves, was written around the time of Childwold, for instance, and revised after the completion of that novel, and again revised this past spring and summer. My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.

Her view of English writers and American novels is one I would like to see expanded. What I wished I had time to write is the social novel more than the psychological. No, I would just like to produce something that another would read without being disgusted at what I have cost them.

INTERVIEWER

You wrote Do with Me What You Will during your year living in London. While there you met many writers such as Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Colin Wilson, Iris Murdoch—writers you respect, as your reviews of their work indicate. Would you make any observations on the role of the writer in society in England versus that which you experience here?

OATES

The English novelist is almost without exception an observer of society. (I suppose I mean “society” in its most immediate, limited sense.) Apart from writers like Lawrence (who doesn't seem altogether English, in fact) there hasn't been an intense interest in subjectivity, in the psychology of living, breathing human beings. Of course, there have been marvelous novels. And there is Doris Lessing, who writes books that can no longer be categorized: fictional parable, autobiography, allegory . . . ? And John Fowles. And Iris Murdoch.

But there is a feel to the American novel that is radically different. We are willing to risk being called “formless” by people whose ideas of form are rigidly limited, and we are wilder, more exploratory, more ambitious, perhaps less easily shamed, less easily discouraged. The intellectual life, as such, we tend to keep out of our novels, fearing the sort of highly readable but ultimately disappointing cerebral quality of Huxley's work . . . or, on a somewhat lower level, C. P. Snow's.

 All writing being an experiment reassures me of my own crazy ways, but it is her discussion of emotions. Stephanie R commented on my stories as not having enough depth, which I interpreted as emotional depth. Reading the following resurrected my worries that I am skimping - paying more attention to the forest of technique than the trees of emotion.

... I suppose it is an experimental work, but I shy away from thinking of my work in those terms: It seems to me there is a certain self-consciousness about anyone who sets himself up as an “experimental” writer. All writing is experimental.

But experimentation for its own sake doesn't much interest me; it seems to belong to the early sixties, when Dadaism was being rediscovered. In a sense we are all post-Wake writers and it's Joyce, and only Joyce, who casts a long terrifying shadow . . . The problem is that virtuoso writing appeals to the intellect and tends to leave one's emotions untouched. When I read aloud to my students the last few pages of Finnegans Wake, and come to that glorious, and heartbreaking, final section (“But you're changing, acoolsha, you're changing from me, I can feel”), I think I'm able to communicate the almost overwhelmingly beautiful emotion behind it, and the experience certainly leaves me shaken, but it would be foolish to think that the average reader, even the average intelligent reader, would be willing to labor at the Wake, through those hundreds of dense pages, in order to attain an emotional and spiritual sense of the work's wholeness, as well as its genius. Joyce's Ulysses appeals to me more: That graceful synthesis of the “naturalistic” and the “symbolic” suits my temperament . . . I try to write books that can be read in one way by a literal-minded reader, and in quite another way by a reader alert to symbolic abbreviation and parodistic elements. And yet, it's the same book—or nearly. A trompe l'oeil, a work of “as if.”

I wonder if this remains true for female writers, but for all of us something here to think about - how empathetic are we towards the characters we write (how sympathetic are we to our fellow human beings? Is there a connection there?)

INTERVIEWER

What are the advantages of being a woman writer?

OATES

Advantages! Too many to enumerate, probably. Since, being a woman, I can't be taken altogether seriously by the sort of male critics who rank writers 1, 2, 3 in the public press, I am free, I suppose, to do as I like. I haven't much sense of, or interest in, competition; I can't even grasp what Hemingway and the epigonic Mailer mean by battling it out with the other talent in the ring. A work of art has never, to my knowledge, displaced another work of art. The living are no more in competition with the dead than they are with the living . . . Being a woman allows me a certain invisibility. Like Ellison's Invisible Man. (My long journal, which must be several hundred pages by now, has the title Invisible Woman. Because a woman, being so mechanically judged by her appearance, has the advantage of hiding within it—of being absolutely whatever she knows herself to be, in contrast with what others imagine her to be. I feel no connection at all with my physical appearance and have often wondered whether this was a freedom any man—writer or not—might enjoy.)

INTERVIEWER

Do you find it difficult to write from the point of view of the male?

OATES

Absolutely not. I am as sympathetic with any of my male characters as I am with any of my female characters. In many respects I am closest in temperament to certain of my male characters—Nathan Vickery of Son of the Morning, for instance—and feel an absolute kinship with them. The Kingdom of God is within.

INTERVIEWER

Can you tell the sex of a writer from the prose?

OATES

Never.

Much to think about and which I hope will inspire others. I will end here, hoping that my admiration is understandable.

sch 1/21

 

Writing Lessons from Joyce Carol Oates

 Mother Jones' Alexander Sammon interviewed Joyce Carol Oates under the headline Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates:

Mother Jones: In the opening essay of Soul at the White Heat, you stake out the different approaches of famous writers pertaining to the place of politics (or social justice) in their writing. On one side we have the likes of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Upton Sinclair, Charles Dickens. On the other there are Oscar Wilde and Vladimir Nabokov, who dismissed this type of writing roundly (“mediocrity thrives on ideas”). What place do politics hold in your writing?

Joyce Carol Oates: The greatest works of literature seem to embody both “art” and “morality” (of some sort). We come away from the tragedies of Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form—yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective. Of course, both Wilde & Nabokov believe in many things, and these things emerge in their writing clearly—for Wilde, the folly of humankind and the (romantic) grandeur of the heroic, lone individual (not unlike Wilde himself); for Nabokov, the possibility of a kind of transcendence through a great, prevailing, superior sort of love (especially in Ada, the most self-congratulatory of novels.) There is a greater art in Dickens than in either Wilde or Nabokov, but it isn’t at the expense of Dickens’ social conscience. It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. “Politics” per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal. I feel akin to Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes “scenes” in his plays, and constitutes “story” in prose fiction. There is something thrilling in the mimesis of life’s surprising unfolding. Long ago I’d said that I am “fascinated by the phantasmagoria of human personality”—this is perhaps even truer now than years ago.

And I find that liberating. Would I had been able to think so decades ago.

MJ: I’m wondering what drives you to write so much, and what you hope to convey at this point in your career.

JCO: I don’t really seem, to myself, to write “so much”—nor do I write quickly. You would be surprised, perhaps stunned, to see how much revising I do in a typical morning. Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process. Writing allows for fictitious voices—the voices of persons unlike myself—that might otherwise be muted.

***

MJ: Tell me a bit more about your own writing process.

JCO: One of the qualities of writing that is not much stressed is its problem-solving aspect, having to do with the presentation of material: how to structure it, what sort of sentences (direct, elliptical, simple or compound, syntactically elaborate), what tone (in art, “tone” is everything), pacing. Paragraphing is a way of dramatization, as the look of a poem on a page is dramatic; where to break lines, where to end sentences. It’s always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole. All these elements are particularly intriguing when a collection of short stories is assembled, for each story relates to the others thematically, and first stories and last stories should be related. It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn’t quite in focus.

All of these processes are constantly undergoing change, of course. “The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence has been written.” Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite. Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I’ve reached the ending. We have not discussed genres, but each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of “form” to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.

I should stress that, for me, voice is predominant. I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express. To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration. If Shakespeare’s great plays are variants of stories, even novels, you can see how each character is telling his story from his perspective; each is vying with the others for dominance, but in the end, in tragedy, most of these voices will die, to be replaced by the yet more vigorous voice of a younger generation. Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling.

Star Trek, Pop Music Going To The Country, and Joyce Carol Oates' Butcher: A Pop Culture Break

I am not the world's greatest Star Trek fan, but this seemed like the best reason to get Paramount+. Reading ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ is over. Now Alex Kurtzman readies for ‘Starfleet Academy’ and ‘Section 31’. I have this schzoid thing going on with Star Trek. On one side, I like Roddenberry's optimism for the future, and on the other this leaves the characters one-dimensional. There is also a problem I have with science fiction in general, I am a fan of both Robert Heinlein and William Gibson.

Likewise, I have never considered myself a country music fan. I do like Hank Williams Sr, Jr, and III; Johnny Cash; Emmylou Harris; Jimmy Rodgers: Sturgill Simpson, Waylon Jennings; Margo Price. Having lived through (and worked in a bar that tried to latch onto the perceived trend) Urban Cowboy, I find myself skeptical of The Guardian's Ten-gallon hits! Why country is the biggest pop music craze of 2024. Country went to town and hooked up with the blues. The article says severla things that might make this different than 40 years; one is that country does story songs (which is one thing I ahve always liked).

Three weeks ago, A Bar Song (Tipsy) went to No 1 on the US country chart, displacing Texas Hold ’Em – the first time in history there had been two consecutive country No 1s by Black artists. It’s all a far cry from even a few years ago, when Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road was removed from the country chart just as it was about to reach the top on the spurious grounds that it did not include “enough elements of today’s country music”. (Billboard denied that race had played any part in the decision.)

“There’s been a change,” says Hannaby. “They’ve been called out. There’s still a problem – I’ve seen a lot of negative comments online about the Beyoncé album and I’m sure that’s affected by racism – but the industry, I think, has changed. As a whole, everyone I know is loving the Dasha track, Beyoncé’s work, Post Malone and Morgan Wallen; radio play is actually happening for them.”

The country-adjacent pivot seems to be one of 2024’s big pop trends. In the wake of Cowboy Carter, Lana Del Rey announced her next album would focus on country music, while Post Malone’s collaboration with Wallen represents a distinct step away from the guitar-pop of his most recent album, Austin, let alone his trap-influenced beginnings.

***

Dasha says the appeal of country to artists from other genres is straightforward: “Country keeps it so grounded and so down-home. It’s not talking about unrelatable, high-level things – country’s for normal people that work 9-to-5 and have hard lifestyles. I feel like that brings a level of authenticity and people are wanting to tap into that again. Honestly, by going into country with my music, I feel like my songwriting has gotten to bloom; it’s more authentically me. Before, I had to write pop lyrics; it was a tighter box I had to live in. Now that it’s country, I feel like the world is my oyster with lyrics.” 

A taste of a review of Joyce Carol Oates's latest novel 

1. Butcher by Joyce Carol Oates
(Knopf)

4 Rave • 2 Positive

“The book has the feverish energy, narrative propulsion and descriptive amplitude—sometimes to excess—of much of her earlier work … Undoubtedly one of her most surreal and gruesome works, sparing no repulsive detail or nefarious impulse. In the end, though, the purview of the novel is larger than one might think, becoming an empathic and discerning commentary on women’s rights, the abuses of patriarchy and the servitude of the poor and disenfranchised. Oates, as is her wont, succeeds in creating a world that is apart from our own yet familiar, making it impossible to dismiss her observations about twisted natures and random acts of violence.”

I am, of course, an Oates fan. 

Check it all out. Sorry about this post being such a dog's breakfast.

sch 5/30

Joyce Carol Oates and Mararet Atwood Together

 I adore Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood. Stick around long enough, you will learn just how much. I read all the Atwood books in the prison library and then used the interlibrary loan program to get more. I did the same with Oates. So I had to read Margaret Atwood's Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood on All Things Evil from Interview Magazine. Just fun to hear the two of them talk to one another, if not quite sounding like sages full of wisdom, they are smart and humane.

sch 8/27/22

Books to Spark Your Creativity; 11-25-2019

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. This may have been for a presentation in one of the community college classes I sgned up for. sch 4/22/2025]

1. Diary of Ann Frank (diary)
2. Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain (Memoir)
3. Chronicles, Volume 1, Bob Dylan (Memoir)
4. X-Ray, Ray Davies (Memoir)
5. The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age, Joyce Carol Oates (Memoir)
6. Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup *  (Memoir)
7. The Story of My Life, Booker T. Washington * (Memoir)
8. Heart of a Woman, Maya Angelou (Memoir)
9. Tibetan Peach Pie, Tom Robbins (Memoir)
10. Couldn't Keep It To Myself, Wally Lamb and the Women of York Prison (Memoir)
11. The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell (Memoir)
12. Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain (Memoir)
13. Travels with Charlie, John Steinbeck (Memoir)
14. The Outsider, Richard Wright (autobiographical fiction)
15. Typee, Herman Melville (autobiographical fiction)
16. Bird on Bird, Anne Lamott (memoir plus how-to-write)
17. On Writing, Stephen King (autobiographical fiction)
18. If He Hollers, Let Him Go, Chester Himes (fiction by felons)
19. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky (fiction by felons)

I did not get a chance to present my list last Wednesday. We - my group - decided to go on rather than await an extension cord for the projector. That list contained only books in the prison library, or I knew were on the compound. I picked them with an emphasis for familiar types in prison. The idea is creativity vented stress and was for the Success and Wellness class, so I think you can see the connection between stress relief and the requirements of the class.

I will add these for you:

1. Milan Kundera, Art of the Novel
2. Albert Camus, The Rebel
3. Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
4. Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness
5. W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
6. Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy
7. Susan Sontag, At the Same Time
8. Joyce Carol Oates, Faith of a Writer
9. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
10. V.S. Naipaul, Writer's People
11. Edward Said, On Late Style
12. Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist
13. Nelson Algren, Nonconformity

Is 32 books too much?

sch

[* These books were ones I had not read and still have not. And in the process of adding hyperlinks to my list, I came across the following:

1. Review: Letters to A Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa (January Magazine)
2. Lost and Found Books: Nelson Algren's Nonconformity: Writing on Writing (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998) (Logos Journal)
3. On Late Style By Edward W Said (The Independent)
4. How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Choosing Presence Over Productivity (The Marginalian)
5. Hatred and Self Loathing: Naipaul’s colonial shame (The Elephant)
6. (Zinta Reviews) The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates
7. "Same Time: Essays and Speeches" by Susan Sontag (A Gathering of the Tribes)
8. The Summing Up - W. Somerset Maugham (My Maugham Collection)
9. Analysis of Milan Kundera’s Novels ( Literary Theory and Criticism)

sch 4/22/25]

Women Writers, Books By Women

 I read somewhere that men will not read women writers. More evidence we are idiots. Well, here are some items to think about.

Joyce Carol Oates has this fearlessness that probably will scare most men. She does not romanticize violence, she looks at it quite cold-bloodily. B-Sides: Joyce Carol Oates’s “them” addresses a different aspect of her writing, her interest in the white working class.

Joyce Carol Oates appears on college syllabi far less than such mid 20th-century male peers as Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966) is included in short-story courses, but none of Oates’s 60-plus novels—neither her early masterwork A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) nor her Marilyn Monroe novel Blonde (1999)—show up with any regularity. Indeed, for most academics, Oates seems oddly peripheral to 21st-century literary culture.

There are myriad reasons for this neglect. In The Program Era, Mark McGurl made the case that Oates’s maximalist aesthetics and her prodigious output irked Alfred Kazin and James Wolcott alike. Elizabeth Dalton (“Joyce Carol Oates: Violence in the Head”) and Leo Robson (“The Unruly Genius”) maintain that Oates’s frequent depictions of violence unsettle readers who assume, as Oates herself put it, that “the territory of the female artist should be the subjective, the domestic.” At base, though, Oates’s quiet disappearance from the academy stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of her interest in white working and lower-middle-class life.

Most major postwar American novelists expressed little interest in disenfranchised whites who “failed” at embourgeoisement. Writers such as E. L. Doctorow and Roth focused on the upwardly mobile, John Updike and Richard Yates on the well-established middle and upper classes, while James Baldwin and Toni Morrison trained their gaze principally on poor communities of color. Oates, though, has returned insistently to the problem of nonmobile whiteness in Blonde; Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990); them (1969); and other important works. And she has done so in an inimitable neonaturalist style, tracing violent narratives that (more like film noir than genteel literary fare) drive to a fated conclusion. For Oates, the desperate American need to claim and maintain whiteness, frequently by way of violence, emerges most palpably in working-class experience.

***

Them remakes the naturalist tradition of novels like Stephen Crane’s Maggie (1893) for a society that seems as incapable of ending an addiction to racist violence in 2023 as it was when Oates wrote a half century ago. In this novel about a fated white working-class family, Oates provides a new perspective on the terrible “price” of whiteness James Baldwin spelled out in “On Being White … And Other Lies” (1984). There, Baldwin argued that “there are no white people”; white identity was a “lie” perpetrated at the expense of people of color. “In this debasement and definition of Black people,” Baldwin wrote, whites “debased and defined themselves.” Gripping, visceral, and relentless, them unmasks that lie of whiteness and, in the process, transforms the pessimistic determinism of a venerable literary mode into a lesson about the horrific persistence of American racism

I freely admit, most of my life I knew of Virginia Woolf only through the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I think I read her essay “A Room of One's Own” in my thirties, and maybe it was later. I never read any of her books until prison, where I came across The Common Reader and To the Lighthouse. I read a biography. I have yet to figure out why anyone would be afraid of Virginia Woolf. I did not get to see the movie, The Hours, but I think this BBC article's thesis may be right: The Hours at 25: The book that changed how we see Virginia Woolf

As in The Hours, this sequence in Woolf Works gestures towards Woolf's death, opening with a reading of her suicide note. It is a bookend to the ballet's beginning, which features the only recording of Woolf's voice, a BBC radio broadcast from 1937 called "On Craftsmanship". In it, she expresses the challenges of using English in writing, so enriched with "echoes, memories, associations" that it becomes impossible to deploy them to express a singular thought without triggering a thousand others. Woolf's legacy is to be tied so intimately to language that her image holds symbolic power in works like The Hours decades after her own lifetime. She continues to give an interpretative language to others.

In the broadcast, Woolf asks, "How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question". The answer, as provided by Cunningham in The Hours, is to retell the old stories in new ways, to place one foot in the past whilst acknowledging that we have no choice but to keep the other in the present. We lose a sense of the "real" Virginia Woolf, whoever she might have been, but it keeps her work fresh and alive in the way she so desperately wanted it to be. 

In A Room of One's Own, Woolf reminds us that we cannot write without laying down flowers at the tombs of the authors, poets, and playwrights who came before us. "For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice." How Woolf is perceived depends on what we want her to be, so that when a passer-by sits on the bench in Richmond with her statue, the conversation can hold whatever meaning they desire. Like the artist Lily Briscoe at the end of her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, Woolf had her vision. Now we must have one of our own.

I have read several really good things about Ann Patchett, yet I have no time to read her, but having read Ann Patchett on Grabbing Galleys and Getting Drafts Done I think I like her.

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your writing education?

AP: Allan Gurganus, my sophomore year of college at Sarah Lawrence. Allan taught me how to work, then throw it out, then work some more. Preciousness is the death of writing, especially when you’re a beginner. At nineteen I would have happily spent a week crafting one perfect sentence. Allan didn’t let us do that, which was an enormous gift since one perfect sentence gets you nowhere.

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

AP: I got the treadmill desk for my fiftieth birthday (I’m fifty-nine now). I wanted one because Susan Orlean had one. Susan Orlean is always ten years ahead of the curve and I strive to emulate her. In the past I had used the treadmill to answer emails or return phone calls but I never used it to write fiction.

 The Brisbane Time reviews Patchett's latest, A family’s season of revelations in the middle of lockdown (The Australian paper has a book review newsletter I suggest you subscribe to, it gives a different perspective and the writing is good):

At first I worried that Tom Lake was going to be a rerun of The Waltons, that folksy 1970s TV series. “Goodnight, John Boy” echoed in my head as I met Laura, a teenager who lands a role in a small-town theatre production in New Hampshire and winds up on a farm in Michigan with a brood of daughters. But this is Ann Patchett, weaver of lifelike human stories so artful that you can never tell where the twisted strands of lightness and dark will lead.

I soon saw that her ninth novel was an all-American version of The Decameron. Or The Magic Mountain, as Patchett wrote in The Getaway Car, a 2011 essay about learning to write: “That novel’s basic plot – a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society in confinement – became the story line for just about everything I’ve ever written.” (She also curses The Brady Bunch, “because all of it stuck”.)

***

Lovers of her writing will wonder how Tom Lake compares with her previous perfect novels about fractured families, Commonwealth and The Dutch House. The seeds of Tom Lake can be traced to another 2011 essay, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, but the novel is less obviously autobiographical than Commonwealth and emotionally warmer than The Dutch House. It perfectly completes a loose (and perhaps unintentional) trilogy with a wholesomeness that reminds us about American decency while refusing to be sentimental.

To say any more would spoil this Russian doll of storytelling, this play within a play within a play. Patchett writes with her usual humanity and time switches so fluid you can’t see the joins. Tom Lake is a reassuring portrait of our plague-time, an antidote to dystopian hysteria, the Patchett novel we need now.

Being sentimental is a fear of mine. I would like to see how she avoids this problem.

 

I do not know Ann Beattie, but the interview, Ann Beattie’s Characters Live in “Uneasy Coexistence”, left interested – if nothing else for executing an idea I have been working on for years. You can decide your own opinion:

In Ann Beattie’s Onlookers, the personal and the political aren’t as separate as its characters might like to believe. Set in present day Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally looms large in the public consciousness—so do the two most recent election cycles, the pandemic, and the intellectual battleground that the University of Virginia has become. Perhaps the most important image, recurring in nearly all of the collection’s loosely-connected short stories, is that of the toppled Confederate statues across the city. Yet despite the history happening all around them, the collection’s titular “onlookers” try to remain exactly that—distant, impartial, and removed from the reckonings happening all across their city and their country.

I spoke with Beattie about Onlookers, liberal bubbles, culture clash, and how to make your metaphors “jangle.”

Martin Dolan: I wanted to ask about the nature of writing a story collection centered around a particular place versus, say, a theme. I know you’ve written location-based collections before. What is it that attracts you to setting in fiction?

Ann Beattie: For one thing, I know Charlottesville very well. I first moved there in 1975; it was where my first job was right out of graduate school. I’ve been in and out of the city since I was 25 years old. Considering what happened there and considering my own long history with the place, I have a personal connection to it.

MD: So why a linked collection as opposed to a novel? Do you think a novel-in-stories lends itself to writing around a place or a moment versus something character or plot-driven?

AB: I wouldn’t say this is a conventionally linked collection of stories. They’re variations on a theme. You’re right that there are a geographic and thematic component, but there’s not any one real link. Traditionally, in novels-in-stories, people will have the same characters come up in story after story, and there’s some sort of trajectory. But I think this one dances around a bit more than those types of books—I wasn’t really going for that same sense of accumulation. The actual significance of recurring images, like the Confederate statues, actually vary story to story. There are common elements, but it’s meant to be more of a theme than about characters.

MD: I really love the scene in the story “Nearby,” where the two main characters are watching from their penthouse as the statues come down. And that comes back to the title of the collection—how these characters are adjacent to these protests and counterprotests, yet, for the majority of them, they’re passive. Do you think that makes for a more engaging story?

AB: I think those characters were right for those stories. They’re of a certain age, a certain social class. If you were up in that penthouse looking down, I’d assume you’d have a very different reaction to what was happening on the ground than the characters. Plus, in that story, the two characters of the husband and wife have different reactions, too. They were chosen on purpose to be perceivers, because I don’t think they’re representative of Charlottesville.

MD: For lack of a better term, it seemed like that sort of culture clash kept coming up story after story. Liberals and Conservatives, young and old, even transplants versus locals. Yet despite these characters being so different, the stories aren’t defined by that difference. It’s more of an uneasy coexistence.

AB: Yeah, that was intentional. Uneasy coexistence is right on target!

MD: These stories are all really grounded in the 2016-to-present moment—lots of references to politics and pop culture—but “Pegasus” is the lone Covid story. What was writing that like? Were there certain cliches you wanted to avoid?

AB: I do tend to write about what I’m immersed in, in terms of both my daily life and a day in the life of the nation. I spend the entire year of 2020 in Maine, because it was the safest place I had available, and I just couldn’t shake that idea of being locked away, of having to be masked. It was omnipresent in my mind.

MD: I think that story has a really great balance of sad scenes and moments of genuine levity. I know there’s humor in all your work, but do you think that its even more important in more socially or politically-grounded fiction?

AB: In general, I think that there is no such thing as ordinary life. There are certain things we have to accept, or learn to accept, but that also doesn’t mean we should lose our sense of humor—or our sense of anger! These are characters that are improvising. They can’t live their usual lives, either pre-pandemic or even before the changes in Charlottesville, yet they’re still moving forward. It’s not that in the past they were taking certain things for granted, or that they’ve become fundamentally different people, but rather that in new situations different aspects of themselves need to be called upon.

That the writers featured in 6 Difficult Women Who Live on in Fiction are all women might point out what men will not write about, how we do not think about certain subjects. I have read Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, did not know Anni Domingo, Breaking the Maafa Chain, and have heard of the other three and am quite curious to read them.

And if you do not get onto the college (and maybe high school) reading lists, you are going out of print quickly. Take a look at Women’s Books We’d Like to See in Print. Oates and Beattie and Patchett still live, they still write, and deserve reading. Mantel and Woolf having passed on, leaving behind books needing read.

sch 8/10

Updated:

Elder Care: On Alexandra Chang’s ‘Tomb Sweeping’ :

One of the final stories in the collection, “Persona Development,” asks what role tech can and should play in elder care. Here, a woman spies on her aging parents using a dystopian surveillance system, which her parents consented to having installed. Like Xu Bing’s 2017 feature-length film Dragonfly Eyes, which features no actors, only CCTV footage spliced from cameras all over mainland China, Chang’s story is told from a voyeur’s point of view. The woman, Patricia, watches through multiple “Eyze Cams” as her parents eat blurry plates of food and mill about their respective living spaces. Patricia’s father in turn spends a great deal of time watching a YouTube channel that recreationally surveils the streets of Zhuhai, China. As Patricia’s desire to check in on her parents from above develops into an unnerving addiction, the story interrogates the ethics of surveillance—do different rules apply to watching your parents than, say, watching your children, your pets, or strangers (as in the case of Dragonfly Eyes)? “It’s not stalking,” Patricia tells her husband, “it’s called elderly monitoring.”

Sarah Thankam Mathews Wants to Remake the World.

Lisa Jewell: ‘I once read 40 Agatha Christie novels in a year’  (a short interview)

‘A smorgasbord of unlikability’: the authors helping ‘sad girl lit’ grow up

If you’ve read a book by a woman, about a woman, that has been published in the last five years, then it’s overwhelmingly likely that this woman was the protagonist. The narrative likely circled around this character’s sadness, her passive struggle to overcome it, and little else. Typically, such stories have notes of darkness but will rarely deliver the actual thing. Usually the main character (like the author) will be middle-class, if not incredibly wealthy. Almost always she will be white. The book’s cover will probably feature a devastated-looking woman with her hair covering her face or her head cradled in her hands.

What you’ll have been reading is sad girl literature – a trend in literary fiction that has come to dominate publishing in the last decade. Books in this genre focus on navel-gazing characters defined by their vulnerability and erratic behaviour. The popularity of these books is difficult to overstate: you can see it in the commercial success of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (which Margot Robbie is reportedly adapting into a film), Coco Mellors’ Cleopatra and Frankenstein, Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times and Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss – all of which continue to feature on bestseller lists and on viral BookTok videos years after publication.

sch 8/13