John Freeman

With each passing year, Joyce Carol Oates' literary production more resembles a seismic event--a mountain range thrust up from the mysterious below. Nearly a hundred books in four decades, and she is nowhere near stopping. The latest peak in Oates' ever-expanding range is "High Lonesome: Stories 1966-2006." In a perfect world, this big, lavish collection will do for Oates what similar volumes did for Katherine Anne Porter and John Cheever. Both of these writers were known (and awarded) in their time as novelists--but they were really short-story scribes.

And so is Oates. The thin, quick air of the short story has always kept her themes most steadily aloft. Her pell-mell prose can speed toward devastating, bloody conclusions. Violence and loss have been her themes all along, and the new work collected in "High Lonesome" reflects that.

In Oates' vision, American life is marked by a primal agoraphobia, something we attempt to tame and name by domesticating the landscape and calling it the suburbs. When that fails, this instinct turns on the female body. Time and again in this book women are smacked, abused, threatened or bullied. In "Tryst," a middle-age executive feeling the yaw of mortality plays fast and loose with a young girl's heart. She responds by slitting her wrists in his luxurious bathroom, splattering blood on his wife's towels.

The pleasures of smashing up everything and starting anew--or ending it all--is never far from view in Oates' world. It's a kind of death wish that bubbles in life's mundane moments, giving the day-to-day a dangerous warble.

"High Lonesome - Selected Stories: 1966-2006"

Joyce Carol Oates

Ecco, 678 pages, $34.95

(2006-04-18)

Also by John Freeman

Nonfiction Review
Memory has always been Edmund White's muse. By the time he published his classic coming-out tale, "A Boy's Own Story" (1982), White was 42 years old and gay liberation was upon us. The story's poignancy arose not out of its immediacy, but its pastness, the sense that retrieving the experience would never redeem it
(2006-04-11)

Poetry Review
William Carlos Williams wrote on prescription pads. Wallace Stevens gave his poems to a secretary at Hartford Accident and Insurance, who typed them up. Poets work with what they've got--and in David Tucker's case, that probably means a reporter's notepad
(2006-04-04)

Nonfiction Review
One of the great falsities of "travel literature" is the idea that we lurch into strange lands, eyes turned mostly outward. The truth is quite the opposite: Staring out at passing landscapes often turns us inward, as do the static hours spent waiting for connecting flights or buses
(2006-03-07)

Fiction Review
Rebecca Brown is one of the best-kept secrets of short fiction
(2006-02-14)

Elementary Justice
(2006-01-31)

Tip of the Week
(2006-01-31)

Nonfiction Review
(2006-01-10)

Nonfiction Review
(2005-11-21)

Fiction Review
(2005-11-15)

Poetry Review
(2005-10-25)

Nonfiction Review
(2005-10-18)

Fiction Review
(2005-10-11)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment