Oates Revisited

Who, besides me, loves Joyce Carol Oates? I met her only once, but her physical body stopped me dead. She looked like a ghost, with that pasty white face of hers, she moved like a tiny bird. How could I not love her, she was so special.

Critics consider her one of America's best writers, and she's certainly one of the most prodigious.  In the fifty-four years she's been writing, she's produced more than 100 titles: novels, short stories, poetry, plays, nonfiction works, and even children's books. And she writes them in longhand, working from "8 till 1 every day, then again for two or three hours in the evening." Goodness!

But Joyce Carol Oates also has written "every imaginable form of physical, psychological and sexual violence: rape, incest, murder, molestation, cannibalism, torture and bestiality," leaving me to wonder, how this gentle birdlike woman became fixated with such dark human impulses.

And her fiction wanders beyond fiction's border, becoming creative nonfiction in the way it explores and describes the real world.

Oates' New Yorker story, "Landfill," featured a student forced down a trash chute at a fraternity house and later found dead in a landfill. She had based it so closely on a true story that those still mourning the actual dead student protested.

When she wrote about poet Robert Frost, she was not complimentary. She made him boorish and vainglorious. Readers see Frost asleep on his porch, "his torso sagged against his shirt like a great udder, and his thighs in summer trousers were fleshy, like those of a middle-aged woman."

So I was not surprised when readers of my recent blog, Ms. Oates Regrets, sided with Jack Loscutoff's loathing of Joyce Carol Oates.

Here's what they wrote:

"I kind of half agree with Jack on Oates.  But must admit, I have read a large number of her books with horrified fascination.  I hate them, but can't put them down."  Ruth Firestone, Hays KS

"Jack's parody resonated with me. I've always loathed Oates, and I wish Jack were still around." Anita Feldman, New York NY

"Ah, I do not loath her but she has never been my cup of tea.  Wish I could have spoken to Jack about her since I'm sure he would have put into words better than I what I find off-putting about her stories.  The three of us might have had a great discussion!"  Deirdre Evans, Omaha, NE