Uncensored: Views & (Re)views

by Joyce Carol Oates

Views & (Re)views is Joyce Carol Oates's most candid gathering of prose pieces since (Woman) Occasions & Opportunities . Her ninth book of nonfiction, it brings together thirty-eight diverse and provocative pieces from the New York Review of Books , the Times Literary Supplement , and the New York Times Book Review . Oates states in her preface, "In the essay or review, the dynamic of storytelling is hidden but not absent," and indeed, the voice of these "conversations" echoes the voice of her fiction in its dramatic directness, ethical perspective, and willingness to engage the reader in making critical judgments. Under the heading "Not a Nice Person," such controversial figures as Sylvia Plath, Patricia Highsmith, and Muriel Spark are considered without sentimentality or hyperbole; under "Our Contemporaries, Ourselves," such diversely talented figures as William Trevor, E. L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Connelly, Alice Sebold, Mary Karr, Anne Tyler, and Ann Patchett are examined. In sections of "homages" and "revisits," Oates writes with enthusiasm and clarity of such cultural icons as Emily Brontë, Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Robert Lowell, Balthus, and Muhammad Ali ("The Greatest"); after a lapse of decades, she (re)considers the first film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula , and Americana , Don DeLillo's first novel, as well as the morality of selling private letters and the nostalgic significance of making a pilgrimage to Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond. Through these balanced and illuminating essays we see Oates at the top of her form, engaged with forebears and contemporaries, providing clues to her own creative "For prose is a kind of music creates 'mood.' What is argued on the surface may be but ripples rising from a deeper, subtextual urgency."

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Literary Criticism, Literature, Books About Books, 20th Century, Ebooks

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Reviews

[Gina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joyce Carol Oates has never had an unpublished thought.

[Kallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I prefer Oates's non-fiction essays and reviews to her fiction (although I haven't given up on the latter). She is thoughtful, fresh, provocative and has turned me to many interesting books and readings. I also like that she does not review books in a negative, sarcastic, or antagonistic way but mainly seems to write about books she finds interesting in order to share her thoughts, which are well worth consideration. She also does not stop with discussing the book, but draws cultural context into her review which makes what she has to say all the more fascinating and insightful, especially to those of us interested in books as reflections of culture and society.

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my attempt to better appreciate Joyce Carol Oates I'm trying to read more of her nonfiction as I've been told by a reliable source that it may bug me less than a lot of her fiction has. (I loved A Garden of Earthly Delights, but so much of her other fiction tends to be repetitive.)

No real complaints here with this book. Oates is knowledgeable about the books she reviewed here, she's clearly done her homework in terms of the authors' past and/or inspirations, and (most importantly) she doesn't bore me.

The biggest problem for me is that I haven't read so many of the books or authors she's discussed here, so on one hand I was in fear that each page would bring me a spoiler that I would be unable to forget, thus ruining the book should I ever get around to reading it. Luckily I have shit for a memories so I imagine by tomorrow morning most of what I have read here will be left behind on my pillow; by the time I get around to reading what Oates has reviewed, it'll be brand-spanking new and I'll be all, "Joyce Carol Oates? Who dat?"

So that's my review. The rest of this is for my own benefit, and for the benefit of my stalkers bookish peeps who give a crap about this sort of thing. I plan on holding onto this book for a while; at least until I can read all the books Oates mentions here. I read a lot but I was almost discouraged to find that I haven't read even the majority of those she mentions here. How does that happen? Do I not read until my eyes bleed? MUST READ MORE. Stop eating! Food slow down reading-time. Who has time to chew? Mastication-shmastication!

On that note - here are the titles she reviews - and the ones I've read/haven't read so I can always come back and strike things off the list. Darwin knows I love striking things off lists. It brings order to my world of chaos.

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Plath

All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren (I had to read this in high school but it was while I was dying of a mutant form of mono so I have no recollection of it other than I cheated on the test. Don't tell anyone.)

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, Joan Acocella
Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World, Janis P. Stout

The Selected Stories, Patricia Highsmith
A Suspension of Mercy, Patricia Highsmith

The Collected Stories, Richard Yates

All the Stories of Muriel Spark, Muriel Spark (Okay, Oates read The Complete Short Stories, but that's not an option here that I can see, and really, isn't it pretty much the same thing? Yeah, I thought so too.)

The Hill Bachelors, William Trevor

City of God, E.L. Doctorow

Undue Influence, Anita Brookner

When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro

The Shark Net, Robert Drewe

A Darkness More Than Night, Michael Connelly

Cherry, Mary Karr

Servants of the Map, Andrea Barrett

Lucky, Alice Sebold (Sigh. I really don't want to read anything by Sebold. Go ahead, convince me otherwise.)

Property, Valerie Martin

Thinks . . ., David Lodge

Eight Months On Ghazzah Street, Hilary Mantel
Giving Up the Ghost : A Memoir, Hilary Mantel

Everything in This Country Must, Colum McCann
Scar Vegas: And Other Stories, Tom Paine
Dressing Up for the Carnival, Carol Shields
In The Gloaming, Alice Elliott Dark
Pastoralia, George Saunders
The Toughest Indian in the World, Sherman Alexie

A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies, John Murray
Goblin Fruit: Stories, David Marshall Chan
Red Ant House: Stories, Ann Cummins
Curled in the Bed of Love, Catherine Brady

Double Vision, Pat Barker

A Ship Made Of Paper, Scott Spencer

The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler

Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

Clotel: or, The President's Daughter, William Wells Brown

Some Ernest Hemingway, pfft.

Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Carson McCullers

Robert Lowell stuff.

Balthus, especially Vanished Splendors: A Memoir

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Geoffrey C. Ward

Americana, Don DeLillo

Them, Joyce Carol Oates (Wonderland Quartet #3 - the first is A Garden of Earthly Delights (WONDERFUL), and I haven't read the others yet: Expensive People (#2) and Wonderland (#4).)

I Lock My Door Upon Myself, Joyce Carol Oates



Okay, so this is really discouraging. Out of all those titles I've only read one of those by Oates herself, Wuthering Heights (snooze), and Connelly's crime genre (which is fun, by the way, don't get me wrong, BUT...).

Clearly I have work to do. Any suggestions where to start? Speak up, yo.

[Nicholas Beck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Challenging, thought provoking collection of reviews and essays. Well worth reading even if you haven't read some of the authors she reviews/writes about. Also how can you go wrong with an author who throws words around like desuetude and atrabilious!

[Christopher Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good collection of essays analysing different aspects of life and literature.

[Wally Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uncensored: Views & (Re)Views by Joyce Carol Oates is a collection of reviews and essays. It was published in 2005, and the works originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times and elsewhere between 1999 and 2004. The dates, however, are irrelevant. Oates' comments about Sylvia Plath, Willa Cather, Richard Yates, Ernest Hemingway, Balthus, and her reviews of books by William Trevor, E. L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Mary Karr among other are as interesting today as when they were published.

I picked the book up because I was curious to see what Oates had to say about these writers, to see if there are writers I ought to know more about (there are), and to improve my own ability to read and, ideally, to write. What does a working novelist and short story author like Oates have to say? What does she respond to in a book? What does she criticize—or feel does not work?

As a writer of fiction, I think about the challenges. How do you engage a reader? How do you create—invent, devise, fabricate, fashion, build, construct—living characters that are, after all, nothing but words on paper? How do you avoid rupturing the reader's willing suspension of disbelief, throwing her out of the story and tempting her to throw the book across the room?

The only way I know to answer questions like these is to learn what seems to work and what usually doesn't work in fiction. You can, I supposed, learn this on your own, but by doing so you are always limited by your own experiences, your own history, by what you are able to bring to and take from the text. A thoughtful reader like Joyce Carol Oates, with her history and her experience, can add alternative insights, ideas, and perspectives to your own.

One of the book's more interesting essays is "A Garden of Earthly Delights Revisited." Oates wrote the novel in 1965-66 (when she was in her late 20s) and had the opportunity to revise it in 2002. "As a composer can hear music he can't himself play on any instrument, so a young writer may have a vision he or she can't quiet execute; to feel something, however deeply, is not the same as possessing the power—the craft, the skill, the stubborn patience—to translate it into formal terms."

I have not done it (and considering the demands on my time, probably won't do it), but a fascinating exercise would be to compare the 1967 edition of A Garden of Earthly Delights to the 2002 edition. How often is it possible to compare a writer's early version of a novel with her mature edition? If you know of any others, please let me know.

[Susan Emmet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again found this unread tome while culling books. Has been a good process because I've discovered so much that I haven't read yet!
This is a collection of essays, arranged by sectional themes, written for The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times Book Review over decades.
I've made up a list of authors from this collection to seek at the library - Patricia Highsmith, Muriel Sparks, William Trevor, Ann Patchett, Don DeLillo, Carson McCullers, Michael Connelly and many others, some of whom I've "read" and some not.
Her work runs the gamut from evaluation and literary criticism, to literary and cultural and athletic icons and movies, as well as re-visits of some of her own work. Learned alot about boxing and boxers like Cassius Clay/Muhammed Ali, Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Joe Frazier and others.
Like her brief comment on how/why she writes: "For prose is a kind of music: music creates 'mood.' What is argued on the surface may be but ripples rising from a deeper, subtextual urgency." And it is an urgency driven by place and time - by visual images, remembered and reworked.

[Jo]

Finally admitted to myself that there is no way I'm going to read any more of this book. And i cannot believe that goodreads does not allow me to just say that I've stopped reading a book. I guess it doesn't believe in that catagory.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth it just for the essay on Patricia Highsmith.

[J. Ewbank · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a different book. Oates handles views and reviews of her work and discusses the work and the reviews. Interesting.

J. Robert Ewbank author "John Wesley, Natural Man, and the 'Isms'"

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretentious.