“I didn’t know him at all, and the only story of his that I really like and teach is not at all like anything else he wrote, it’s only about two pages long,” she admits easily. Yes, Oates says, it was inspired by the late David Foster Wallace no, she was not particularly a fan. And once she warms to the topics at hand-including but not limited to her exhaustively noted productivity and penchant for online rabble-rousing-Oates is unfailingly thoughtful, engaged, and occasionally ruthless in her assessment of a poorly phrased question or a mediocre piece of writing.Įven “The Suicide,” a striking stream-of-consciousness piece midway through Zero that traces the conflicted inner monologue of a bipolar novelist who was once a celebrated wunderkind of modern lit, comes at its subject with a refreshing lack of reverence. This month, she is set to follow last year’s Babysitter, a novel haunted by a spate of real-life child murders in circa-1977 Detroit, with the taut, nervy, and often fantastically unsettling story collection Zero Sum. In addition to fiction, she continues to be a concise and sometimes devastating book critic, a keen Substacker, and a bit of a lunatic on Twitter. Unlike so many of them, the Lockport, New York native remains famously, almost ferociously active-still regularly teaching at several universities and producing reams of new material across multiple forms. Book-club cubs may come and go, in whatever splashy flavor-of-the-season form the current industry model allows, but big cats like Oates feel increasingly, distressingly rare: envoys from a vanishing world that once placed Great Authors at the center of a zeitgeist now endlessly splintered and atomized. Oates, who recently celebrated her 85th birthday, is of course very much one of them, among the last of a set of literary lions that lately seem (see Amis and Cormac McCarthy) to be leaving the planet with astonishing speed. And her conversation comes dotted with offhand allusions to erstwhile friends and colleagues- Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Martin Amis, Saul Bellow-that she occasionally refers to on a first-name basis, as if they were not in fact towering icons of 20th-century culture. On her mouth is a pleasingly vampish slash of lipstick the color of crushed blackberries in a guest bathroom, a vibrant portrait of Marilyn Monroe, inscribed to her from a novelist friend on the occasion of her fever-dream 2000 opus, Blonde, nestles next to a small, moody De Kooning sketch. She is avid to dissect the recent series finale of Succession (“I think I liked the penultimate episode best, the finale itself was more familiar stuff where they were just conniving”) and breezily dismisses a recent bout with COVID (“The strain I got was evidently very weak, it was really just a cold.”)īut small clues of her life and legacy-some 60-plus novels, along with a vast inventory of essays, short stories, plays, and poetry - soon begin to surface. Oates, who appears at the door in light walking shorts and one of those nylon baseball caps that generally come free with a book-fair tote bag, seems likewise unfussily removed from the idea of any high-goth priestess of the arts-gesturing happily to the fruits of her early summer garden and making fond introductions to her two house cats, a majestic but apprehensive Maine Coon and a smoky calico that immediately flops over and shows its belly. Could this dappled suburban idyll possibly contain the formidable figure renowned for more than half a century as our Dark Lady of Letters? So the vision that greets visitors at the entrance to her light-filled home near Princeton University, where she’s taught for more than four decades-a burbling frog pond, metallic lawn ornaments molded jauntily into oversize roses and a lone, red-combed rooster-conjures a momentary sense of disorientation. “Whimsy” is not a word often associated with Joyce Carol Oates, the five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, social media provocateur, and notoriously prolific chronicler of America’s cracked, calamitous heart.
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