Like many people, novelist Garth Risk Hallberg was intimidated by the volume of works by the famous American writer Joyce Carol Oates, which includes dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories. “I think what everyone feels with her is fear,” he said. “You think, ‘What if I don’t like it?’ And then you think — and worse — what if I do He doesOn this occasion, Hallberg quickly became a fan, though he admits that he still finds it difficult to sum up its appeal: the problem with Oates’s installation is that it is “about ten different things”, including Gothic stories, crime novels, and short stories. Not so long ago, Hallberg selected some recommendations from Oates’s book and his notes have been edited and condensed.
I lock myself
By Joyce Carol Oates
Before last summer, the only Oates story I had read was the short story everyone reads, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” I think I was seventeen years old. I remembered it clearly for years and years. Its signature is a kind of “you are there” quality, where the reader is not really guided on what to think or how to interpret events. There’s a lot of power in that. Then I read this short novel, from 1990, in the Granta anthology edited by Richard Ford, “Granta’s Book of the American Long StoryAnd I thought, holy shit. This has a lot of the verve that I remembered from Where Are You Going, but it extends into this fully clothed drama, where you get a complete picture of a woman’s life from childhood to old age. The writing is really gripping.
they
By Joyce Carol Oates
This is the first book I’ve read by her that stuck with me from the first page. I think it has one of the greatest endings in twentieth-century American fiction. I read it because I’m in a book club where we read long books, and after I finished it…Anniversary“, by Uwe Johnson, embarked on Oates’s Wonderland tetralogy, of which this is the third installment – the others being”Garden of earthly delights“From 1967;”People are expensive“from 1968; and”Wonderland“From 1971.
It’s a very loose tetralogy, in the style of Philip Roth’s American Trilogy. Violence and family are at the heart of every book. Three of them cover the same time period, from the Great Depression through the 1960s. They also share a deep and intelligent interest in social class, which I sometimes feel is the missing element in a lot of American novels. You can sense that Oates’s ambition here is to have Balsatian leadership at many different class levels, and although she has not managed to reach the upper levels yet – after thirty years, she will – she writes convincingly and well here about poor people and class working class, and popular movements among those classes.
blond
By Joyce Carol Oates
Blonde, from 2000, is among Oates’ longest books, which is kind of disappointing because it’s also among her best — it would be the one I’d recommend first, but I don’t know how accessible it will be. (I might say the new reader should start with the collection)Aaliyah is lonely(and, in particular, with the story “Little Avalanches.”) It is a fictional retelling of the life of Marilyn Monroe – or the life of Norma Jean Baker, as she was actually called. I don’t tend to read historical novels, but for me, this is much closer to novels truly accessible experientialism, such as “Underworld“or”Mason and Dixon“.
Of all the Oates novels I’ve read, I think this one has the most depth of character. Monroe feels like a real person. I was surprised, I didn’t expect it to be so persistent, page after page. But it is. The one thing this book really conveys is Oates’s sense of individual and individual psychology, which is completely unique. I think she had a deep intuition about personality as something diffuse and fragmented, something we put on smart clothes every morning and put out into the world as if it were a coherent thing. Do I agree with this opinion? Not necessarily. But it’s really interesting and compelling to wear for a while. And that’s why I think “Blonde” is somewhat central to her work – because in the person of Marilyn Monroe, it’s easy to see how she is, on the one hand, a particular character, and how, on the other hand, as you stay with her for the duration of the novel, she’s not… Just one thing.