Joyce Carol Oates ??
T.R.U.E., Week of 8/5, Post #4:
This week's final Round-up post is less a review or a recommendation than a call for conversation:
Someone, please, help me with Joyce Carol Oates.
The thing is, I've tried. For years. Often, and across at least a few of the vast continents of material in that catalog. Always, always, I admire the barely-controlled--but always controlled--splatters of imagery and wild color. I not only concede but applaud the icy insights into deceptively comfortable moments between people who think they know each other. Once or twice (Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
springs immediately to mind, but even then, I have to admit, I liked the movie more; it was kinder, and therefore MORE menacing), I've hit things I came close to loving.
But for me, there's still something missing. Sometimes, yeah, it's the pleasures her plots promise. Sometimes it's anyone I can care about, or just a sense that there's someone in the narrative that Oates cares about. Sometimes, her work really does read, to me, like the writing of someone who needs to come away from the desk, just every now and then. Have a glass of o.j., watch the sunset. Check out "Sharknado," maybe.
Most recently, I tackled Bellefleur, and it is suffused, swamped with sexually repressed and desperate characters, dark hallways, raging storms, a crumbling upstate New York castle, family secrets, a possibly clairvoyant cat. And yet...nothing happens. No one matters, even to each other, in the end, and so they don't to the reader, either. The book stays a 700-page fugue, a blizzard of post-Gothic imagery, beautiful, remote, startling, boring.
Am I wrong? Am I on the wrong Oates continent? Is there a slightly warmer one?
I'm so, so willing to be wrong.
Have at it...
This week's final Round-up post is less a review or a recommendation than a call for conversation:
Someone, please, help me with Joyce Carol Oates.
The thing is, I've tried. For years. Often, and across at least a few of the vast continents of material in that catalog. Always, always, I admire the barely-controlled--but always controlled--splatters of imagery and wild color. I not only concede but applaud the icy insights into deceptively comfortable moments between people who think they know each other. Once or twice (Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
springs immediately to mind, but even then, I have to admit, I liked the movie more; it was kinder, and therefore MORE menacing), I've hit things I came close to loving.
But for me, there's still something missing. Sometimes, yeah, it's the pleasures her plots promise. Sometimes it's anyone I can care about, or just a sense that there's someone in the narrative that Oates cares about. Sometimes, her work really does read, to me, like the writing of someone who needs to come away from the desk, just every now and then. Have a glass of o.j., watch the sunset. Check out "Sharknado," maybe.
Most recently, I tackled Bellefleur, and it is suffused, swamped with sexually repressed and desperate characters, dark hallways, raging storms, a crumbling upstate New York castle, family secrets, a possibly clairvoyant cat. And yet...nothing happens. No one matters, even to each other, in the end, and so they don't to the reader, either. The book stays a 700-page fugue, a blizzard of post-Gothic imagery, beautiful, remote, startling, boring.
Am I wrong? Am I on the wrong Oates continent? Is there a slightly warmer one?
I'm so, so willing to be wrong.
Have at it...
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