Embracing the twists and turns of everyday American life, the author’s latest short story collection is playful, gripping and disturbing. The Observer, March 22
Joyce Carol Oates’s multitudinous collections are repeatedly subtitled “tales of suspense” or “stories of mystery”. You tend to know what you’re getting with an Oatesian short – a disquieting snapshot of American life on the verge of individual or ideological collapse – and these nine additions to her oeuvre don’t disappoint.
The first, Detour, is a classic of its type. A diversion forces a woman down a forest road, she wrecks her car and, looking for help, ends up a befuddled prisoner in an isolated house. The set-up is cliched to the point of being arch, but Oates brilliantly toys with our understanding of a confused mental state.
Miss Golden Dreams 1949 is mischievously written from the perspective of a cloned Marilyn Monroe doll
At least there’s some relief at the end of that horror. In Wanting, the rising panic the reader and protagonist feel as she agrees to go to a stranger’s macabre studio is gripping. There’s a similar exploration of the excitement inherent in a reckless act in Intimacy, where a creative writing professor is thrilled and intimidated by a supposed war veteran’s threatening demeanour. The reckoning here is left entirely to our imagination – another typically superb Oates trope.
Throughout, she stylishly conveys the sweep of a life; the consequences of experiences, however tiny. The smaller experiments with form are interesting too. In Parole Hearing, California Institution for Women, Chino, CA, she inhabits a fictional disciple of Charles Manson, every sentence beginning “Because”. Miss Golden Dreams 1949, meanwhile, is mischievously written from the perspective of a cloned Marilyn Monroe doll.
The collection ends with the title story, in which a woman who has fought off unbearable abuse is pregnant and happy. When her sliding doors moment arrives, a hopeful or heartbreaking future is left open to interpretation. It’s Oates’s work in microcosm; nuanced rather than neat.
