Joyce Carol Oates

I have been hibernating.

I have been eating, sleeping and reading, and trying to interact as little as possible with the rest of the human race.  I have still done homework, laundry, food related drudgery and cat wrangling.  We are all still clean and functional, but everything else has been pared to the bone.

It has done me the world of good.  I surfaced from my self-imposed exile this morning feeling like a human being again.  I am all in favour, and so, I think, is everyone else.

Yesterday I was not angry.  Yesterday I was sad and despairing. When I was awake, which thankfully was not very much of the time.

So I do not have much to talk to you about except books, because books are absorbing, they don’t answer back, they don’t mind if I am cross or tired or sad, and they give my brain peace like nothing else.

I have read a couple of novels for review, the less said about which the better frankly.  I cannot recommend them, so I will gloss over the details.  I was slightly annoyed that they took up so much of my time, but am happy now they have gone away, never to be seen again.

I am getting on with my great American literature project.  I finished reading Joyce Carol Oates; ‘Mother, Missing’.

I’ve never read any of her work before, but it seems that she is a prolific and much feted author.  I feel her fame must be wider in the US than here, as I don’t think I am aware of anyone else who has ever spoken to me about her books or recommended anything by her.

It was an interesting read.  It is about a woman who is the baby of the family, the rebel and outsider, who reluctantly visits her mother one day to find that she has been murdered, and that she is the first one to discover the body.

I’m not giving anything away here, it’s all in the synopsis. The story isn’t really a crime novel, and the perpetrator is caught very early on in the book.  The murder is used as a lens through which the author examines the relationship between a mother and a daughter, and what falls away and what remains after such a shocking event.

I was intrigued by it.  I can’t say it was a brilliant book, but it was engaging.  It kept me turning the pages. I was interested enough to read it in one sitting, and some of the aspects of the novel have stayed with me.  I was surprised by how easy it was to read. I had expected it to be dense and forbidding, but it wasn’t. In some ways it reminded me a little of the work of Jonathan Tropper, an author I admire very much.  There was also an echo of Anne Tyler.  It’s that kind of domestic drama, but which has plenty of thoughtfulness and levels of interpretation in it.

Oates also seems interested in violence, and how it shapes us, what it does to us emotionally as well as physically, and how we respond to it either as the perpetrators of violence or when violence is done to us.  There is a noirish element to her work that I really like. If it hadn’t been there in this book I think I would have found it too touchy feely and saccharine.  It gives her work edge, and bite.

The characterisation was a little patchy. The heroine didn’t always ring true for me, and I found myself a little frustrated by a certain amount of clumsiness in the way she was written, but I think it was because Oates was more interested in the dynamic of the relationships rather than the character herself.

I was intrigued enough to have tracked down a copy of Oates book; Blonde, which is her fictional take on the life of Marilyn Monroe, and one of the books Oates  thinks she will be most remembered for.  I am really looking forward to reading it.

Yet again, another strike for female American authors as opposed to male American authors.  Maybe I have found my groove.

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