Reading Joyce Carol Oates

I'm about to finish Joyce Carol Oates' most recent novel--My Life as a Rat (2019)--and, as usual when I read her, I'm stunned. And stunned is not too strong a word. (I will be posting about this book in Sunday Sundries this week, so I won't say much about it here.)

Let's back up.

I began reading Oates back in the late 1960s when her novel them was, well, stunning everyone. (In fact, it would win the 1970 National Book Award for Fiction.) And throughout her long, incredibly productive career she has won numerous other awards. But the one I'm waiting for? The Nobel Prize. She has earned it. Fiction (sometimes under a pseudonym), nonfiction, drama, poetry--all of this (and more!) she writes.

I've not read it all. She is so productive (as I said) that she reminds me of, oh, Anthony Trollope or Charles Dickens with a word-processor. Trollope (1815-82) wrote forty-seven novels--and there would have been a lot more if he had not been forced to write them all by hand.

I think I've read all of her novels--there are about fifty of them. Quite a few of her collections of short fiction--there are more than forty of them. (I especially enjoyed Wild Nights!--the title is from the Emily Dickinson poem (link to it)--a collection of highly imaginative stories based on the lives of actual writers.)

When I was reviewing books for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, I got to review a couple of Oates' books (Wild Nights!--2008--and Daddy Love--2013). (I still review for Kirkus Reviews--but nonfiction only.)

And among the things that astonish me about her?

• How she--with such apparent ease--enters the minds and hearts of such a wide diversity of characters--from all walks of life. Many are seriously damaged by their lives, but, somehow, they persevere, sometimes in a staggering, stumbling way.
• Her profound ability to make you care about her characters--even those whose deeds don't always make them all that admirable.
• Her fluid, engaging, pellucid prose.
• Her absolute mastery of a wide variety of narrative techniques.
• Her ... well ... just about anything she does on the page!

She taught at Princeton University for a long time--is now retired ... sort of: She still teaches a course now and then. And (though I'm veering close to cliche now, I know) her writing continues to be one of my most valuable instructors. I learn something on every page--something technical, something human, something surprising, something unique, something ...

Joyce Carol Oates is now 81 years old, but you would have no hint of that on her recent pages, pages that continue to crackle with the electricity of intelligence, imagination, and creative energy.

She is a wonder. And her books are wonder-full.

our shelves of Oates' books