Category: Joyce Carol Oates

Readerville’s Gayla Bassham points to the San Diego Union-Tribune‘s interview with Joyce Carol Oates, who’s traveling to San Diego to discuss two of her latest books, the novel My Sister, My Love and the short-story collection, Wild Nights! I’m much more a fan of the latter than the former—her ability to inhabit the minds of four notable American writers seems like a more impressive achievement then registering a straightforward (if epic) grouse about tabloid culture. Plus, Wild Nights! allowed her to hang out with the folks she considers her people:

“I think of myself as a wholly American writer in the tradition, however our styles may vary, of Melville, Poe, Twain, Dreiser, Faulkner, Hemingway – holding a kind of mirror to our lives that, despite its idiosyncratic distortions, is an authentic reflection of our lives.”

“American writers are fascinated by their now-iconic, ‘classic’ predecessors,” Oates states. “There is a kind of hypnotic spell cast by the 19th-century writers of idiosyncratic genius and by the incomparable tragic figure, Hemingway. The major attraction in writing about them in fiction – I’ve written about each of them in critical essays – was to immerse myself in their language and in their worldviews, to the degree to which I could do this.”

Two more JCO books are coming: A story collection, Dear Husband, and a mystery-suspense novel, A Fair Maiden.

Cheryl Truman of the Lexington Herald-Leader asks Joyce Carol Oates a glum question and gets a glum answer:

Does Oates see herself with that Nobel Prize? No. Her husband is dead now, and so are her parents (“It’s one’s parents who care,” she says). Who’s going to celebrate with her, be proud of her now? Winning the Nobel would be, she says, just a little sad.

“No, I must say, it doesn’t mean much to me.”

Truman’s inquiry stems from a statement she makes early in her piece that “the only major award that she has not received is the Nobel Prize for literature.” Sounds right. Isn’t right. According to Celestial Timepiece, the absurdly granular Web site dedicated to Oates’ work, JCO has never won:

The Pulitzer Prize
The Orange Broadband Prize
The PEN/Faulkner Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award

She did win the National Book Award—in 1970, which means she’s suffering a 38-year drought in which the NBAs passed over (rough estimate) 286 of her books. Her acceptance speech for that prize is worth a read. It’s been a long time since she’s won a big prize, but she hasn’t changed her mission statement:

In novels I have written, I have tried to give a shape to certain obsessions of mid-century Americans: a confusion of love and money, of the categories of public and private experience, of a demonic urge I sense all around me, an urge to violence as the answer to all problems, an urge to self-annihilation, suicide, the ultimate experience, and the ultimate surrender. The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Residents of the greater Washington, D.C. area are currently having their patience tested with a 12-part series about the death of Chandra Levy. Best as anybody can tell, the series is little more than a tick-tock of a scandal that happened seven years ago, one that sheds no new light on how to investigate a high-profile murder in general, or on how D.C. police in particular might better comport themselves in the future. It’s old and tiring stuff to a lot of people, which may be why nobody seems to be beating down the door to talk about Joyce Carol Oates‘ new novel about a JonBenet Ramsey manque, My Sister, My Love.

To be sure, the book has issues. (If critical characters like Skyler’s dad seem wooden and irrational, is that Oates brilliantly exposing the tics of the novel’s unreliable narrator, or is she just writing weak characters?) But Oates’ obsession with tabloid-news culture itself never seems misguided, and she discusses “tabloid hell” in an interview with BookPage, in which she reveals that Bill O’Reilly was good for something:

“I had the whole Fox News syndrome,” she says. “I was watching Fox News while I wrote the novel, watching Bill O’Reilly. I do come from a Christian background and the Christianity on Fox News is just used for political purposes, it’s so transparent. Bill O’Reilly always used to say ‘secular progressive’ for left wing. Secular progressive sounds pretty good to me! Fox News? I call it Hawk News. I don’t watch that anymore. I just can’t even look at it now.” She detoxed with “The Daily Show.” “He’s excellent,” she says. “I get a lot of news from Jon Stewart.”

Time catches up with Joyce Carol Oates, author of the fascinating/maddening novel, My Sister, My Love, which was inspired by the JonBenet Ramsey case. (I hope to have time at some to write down some of the issues I have with the book.)

Is it a bad thing that there was so much publicity about the real case?

I think it satisfies a certain desire or hunger in the populace. It depends what you think news is.

Actually, Oates has more than a couple of sentences’ worth of thoughts on the matter.