Joyce Carol Oates

An anthology of short fiction selected by the author herself features selections from "The Wheel of Love," "Marriages and Infidelities," and "Heat," as well as eleven previously unpublished works.

Stories 1966-2006

High Lonesome

Andrew John Kinney

3.4.

Well, that was painful. I decided to read a book of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates because I knew she was a well-known and respected American author, and I thought I would see what her oeuvre was all about. In order to avoid spoilers, I will summarize, in no particular order, the main events of the first twenty stories in this collection: there are two cases of a brother assaulting a sister, a serial killer-rapist, two cases of attempted rape and an actual rape, a suicide and an attempted suicide, girl killed by boyfriend, woman kills abusive husband, man kills cousin, attempted murder of a girl, a story which is a litany of various crimes less than felonies, man beats woman, boy is killed for body parts, one story about stalking and counter-stalking, man kills daughter’s supposed boyfriend, and one where nothing bad happens. Maybe that doesn’t add up to twenty, but take my word for it, there are only two or three stories where grievous harm does not enter into the picture, and in basically every case, a man is the perp, or his abusive behavior drives the woman to kill him or kill herself. Cheerful, eh?

So, this pattern got me to thinking. I’ve known or been acquainted with many, many people in my life, thousands and maybe tens of thousands, and in all my years I have known personally of only one person who was murdered, and I knew her only slightly. And yet, I’ve known many people who were deathly afraid of home invasion, and consequently kept guns to defend themselves (the possession of which undoubtedly causes other suicides or homicides). I couldn’t help thinking that Ms. Oates was one of those upper middle-class people who fear assault or murder by the “others”. And this constant pattern of bad men killing or raping or sexually assaulting or beating women started to wear on me, until it really became a chore to finish the book. To be fair, in her later stories, some sympathetic male characters started to appear, but in such small numbers. Elizabeth Strout and Margaret Atwood do not write this way. Their male characters are sometimes bad, sometimes good; they are not monochromatic. 

I am not naive, and I do not deny that such things happen, but they do not happen at even 1/100th the rate which one would assume they do if Ms. Oates' work was your only guide to life in the United States. In one of her stories, the male protagonist asks the female protagonist, “Do you just hate men, or is it the whole species?” Good question, Ms. Oates. Even in the stories where men are sympathetic, the story itself is usually a downer. The quality of the writing is quite good, but I’ll take Margaret Atwood any day of the week over Joyce Carol Oates' world in which 90% men are violent and 70% women are weak. Perhaps an even better antidote to this dismal experience might be to read some more Jane Austen books I've been meaning to start.

Oh well, now I know J.C. Oates is not for me.

High Lonesome Stories 1966-2006

Reviews