This novel is presented to us in the opening section and author’s introduction from its publication as a “history in novel form” which may or may not have truth to it. (I am dubious about it myself). And there’s a strange middle section that lasts about ten pages where a main character in the novel (there’s mostly two, but kind of a third) writes a series of letter to “Miss Oates” (ie Joyce Carol) as if she were a former student reflecting back on college […]
Hello!
I am more or less live-blogging this one a little bit, so my feelings on it might change as I go. I do not dislike this novel, and in fact, in some ways I think it’s perfectly good. The story is about a research neuro-physiologist named Margot Sharp who spends her lengthy career working with an amnesiac named Elihu Hoopes. It is repeatedly insisted throughout the novel that she is a doctor, in the sense of a scientist, but not a doctor, in the sense […]
Her problem wasn’t she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn’t a blonde and she wasn’t dumb.
So Marilyn Monroe has been dead for more than 50 years, and so the uncomfortable attention in this novel is long past the subject’s personal pain. And while Joyce Carol Oates’s novel can feel a little ghoulish at times (for example, Arthur Miller was still alive when this came out–although he comes across perfectly nice in this book…not so much for Joe Dimaggio), she is not the first, the last, or the worst to do so. In fact, implicit in this novel is the awareness […]
My heart beat hard and furious against my ribs like a fist wanting to hurt
Amazon released this Kindle Single as a teaser for a forthcoming book from Joyce Carol Oates. I generally love Oates. She makes me uncomfortable in all the right ways, and reminds readers regularly that all manner of person can be a victim and all manner of person can be a predator. This is a fascinating and quick read, almost dream-like in some ways because it is first-person narrative in the head of a young man actively dissociating as a protective mechanism for seemingly numerous traumas. […]
Weird mix of weird
Across Five Aprils: 4/ 5 Stars This is another Civil War book, and another Civil War book taking place in the midwest, that I read as a kid. I grew up in the South and thought about the Civil War a LOT. It happens. Anyway, like Rifles for Watie mentioned in the previous one, this focuses on the western theater of the war but still deals a lot with the news from the East. This becomes a kind of interesting conceit, where our main character […]
Finally getting through a few story collections I have been picking at and one brand new one.
American Gothic Tales; American Supernatural Tales; Her Body and Other Parties; Honeydew by Joyce Carol Oates; ST Joshi; Carmen Maria Machado; Edith Pearlman
American Gothic Tales – Ed. Joyce Carol Oates 5/5 Stars Joyce Carol Oates knows her stuff. Her introduction to this collection her focus on the Gothic as the selection process makes this an incredibly satisfying collection because it’s not all one type of story. So while on the one had you do in fact get a bunch of ghost stories, you also get stories that are eerie or disturbing or full of murder, and you get stories that are off-putting but not directly scary stories, […]