Joyce Carol Oates--A Marvel

It's possible I've written here before about Joyce Carol Oates. Tough. I'm going to do it again--for she has been one of the true literary marvels of my reading life--indeed, in all of American literary history, I think.

The first book of hers I read was them, 1969, a novel that won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1970. (And, yes, the title is not capitalized--see pic below.) (She's since gone on to win so many prizes--though not the Pulitzer, not the Nobel--though she's been nominated five times for the former.)

Anyway, them hooked me, and I have read most (not all! who could possibly have read all!) of her scores of novels, her collections of short stories and essays, the novels she wrote under a pseudonym (as Rosamand Smith and Lauren Kelly). She has published volumes of poetry, of fiction for YA readers, books for children, memoirs. A long-time fan of pugilism, she even has a book about boxing--On Boxing (1987--and, yes, I read it). Oh, and some plays, too.

Dickens and Trollope and Collins must be looking down on her (or up?), dazzled from beyond the grave by her productivity.

We don't own all of Oates' books--but a lot, as this picture shows ... and this picture is not a current one!

What can she not do?

The novels are quite different from one another--she is not one of those writers who write the same book fifty times. Style, subject, point-of-view, setting, tone--these vary throughout her work, although she is fond of Niagara County, New York, where she grew up.

She can be violent (or not), nostalgic (or not), horrifying (or not). She can, it seems, be any damn thing she wants to be on the page. A rare gift.

I'm writing this today because I read that she's recently released another novel, Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. (Sounds like a Stephen King title, doesn't it?) I ordered it, and it arrived yesterday--all eight hundred pages of it! That's right: eight hundred pages!

Another reason she's been on my mind: There's a recent assessment of her in a New Yorker (link to article), an assessment that (sort of) reviews her career (how could a writer possibly cover all of it!?), and although it was generally positive, I felt it was not ... celebratory enough. (My bias.)

Anyway, as soon as I finish the new Colum McCann novel I'm reading (Apeirogon, 2020--maybe tomorrow?), I'm going to dive once again into the magical depths of an Oates novel.

In mid-June Oates had her 82nd birthday. I'm 75 now; maybe I'll finish her new one by the time I'm 82?

Some years ago--in a review of one of her books for the Cleveland Plain Dealer--I wrote that Oates deserves the Nobel Prize. I meant it then; I mean it even more now. Don't want to start anything, but awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan before Oates is, in my mind, a travesty. And I've loved Dylan's music since the days of his playing a harmonica and acoustic guitar!