What do you think?
Rate this book
Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life – Essays on American Literature and the Art of the Writer's Craft
A new collection of critical and personal essays on writing, obsession, and inspiration from National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, now in paperback.
"Why do we write?"
With this question, Joyce Carol Oates begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life, and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities, in this collection of seminal essays and criticism. Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer’s inspiration—do subjects haunt those that might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something "happen" to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer’s best work?
In Soul at the White Heat, Oates deploys her keenest critical faculties, conjuring contemporary and past voices whose work she deftly and creatively dissects for clues to these elusive questions. Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and many others appear as predecessors and peers—material through which Oates sifts in acting as literary detective, philosopher, and student. The book is at its most thrilling when watching the writer herself at work, and Oates provides rare insight into her own process, in candid, self-aware dispatches from the author’s own writing room.
Longtime admirers of Joyce Carol Oates’ novels as well as her prose will discover much to be inspired by and obsess upon themselves in this inventive collection from an American master. As the New York Times has said of her essays, “Oates’s writing has always seemed effortless: urgent, unafraid, torrential. She writes like a woman who walks into rough country and doesn’t look back.”
"Why do we write?"
With this question, Joyce Carol Oates begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life, and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities, in this collection of seminal essays and criticism. Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer’s inspiration—do subjects haunt those that might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something "happen" to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer’s best work?
In Soul at the White Heat, Oates deploys her keenest critical faculties, conjuring contemporary and past voices whose work she deftly and creatively dissects for clues to these elusive questions. Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and many others appear as predecessors and peers—material through which Oates sifts in acting as literary detective, philosopher, and student. The book is at its most thrilling when watching the writer herself at work, and Oates provides rare insight into her own process, in candid, self-aware dispatches from the author’s own writing room.
Longtime admirers of Joyce Carol Oates’ novels as well as her prose will discover much to be inspired by and obsess upon themselves in this inventive collection from an American master. As the New York Times has said of her essays, “Oates’s writing has always seemed effortless: urgent, unafraid, torrential. She writes like a woman who walks into rough country and doesn’t look back.”
400 pages, Paperback
First published September 20, 2016
About the author
Joyce Carol Oates
857 books9,984 followersJoyce 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.
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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
February 5, 2017
Joyce Carol Oates is such a prolific writer that it may surprise some of her readers to discover that she is also a committed and voracious reader. It’s easy to imagine the perennial question which Oates is asked “How do you write so much?” being quickly followed by “How do you read so much?” Soul at the White Heat is a sustained and fascinating collection of nonfiction chronicling not only her reflections as a writer, but her engagement with a wide range of books by authors —some of whom are “classics” and others “contemporaries.” Every analysis or review Oates gives of a single book is scattered with mentions of that author’s other publications as well as a wide variety of other writers and books which provide enlightening points of reference. The collection is filled primarily with book reviews, so the subtitle “Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life” clues the reader into how the compulsion to write is inextricably linked to the desire to read widely and rigorously. Because this collection comes from a writer of such productivity and stature, it can be read in two ways. The first is as an astute survey of writing from some of the greatest past and present practitioners of the craft. The second is as a supplement to Oates’s own fiction, providing fascinating insights into how her perspective on other writing might relate to her past publications. However, underlying this entire anthology is the question of why writers feel inspired to write and what compels us to keep reading.
Read my full review of Soul at the White Heat by Joyce Carol Oates on LonesomeReader
Read my full review of Soul at the White Heat by Joyce Carol Oates on LonesomeReader
December 22, 2018
This collection of previously published essays, mostly book reviews which examine biographies, and sometimes autobiographies, of creative people--writers classic and contemporary, artists—there’s a review of a collection of the letters of photographer Alfred Steigliz and painter Georgia O'Keefe, lovers, husband and wife, and lifelong mutual muses--even the autobiography of boxer Mike Tyson.
I found these essays well-written, all subjects of passionate interest to their author. However, like a candy sampler, each person is going to find things they want to spit out. I for one don't care for coconut-- nor Lovecraft, nor an offbeat biographical novel of Emily Dickinson as adventurer. I put those back, half-eaten. I ate half of an essay about Margaret Atwood's thoughts on speculative fiction/sci fi and JCO's thoughts on same.
For me the collection really heated up in her reviews of contemporary fiction, both when they concerned books I’d read, and equally those I had not. It's a pleasure to read reviews of books one has read and and subject one knows well--to compare one's own responses with those of such a extremely keen-eyed, deep-thinking guide as Oates—but also a pleasure to read about books one is unlikely to ever open. A well-done review can give you a taste of that work, a flavor of that subject, expanding your world despite yourself.
My favorite offerings—the chocolate toffees, the caramels and truffles—were the reviews of works by contemporary writers Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Drabble, Louise Erdrich, Karen Joy Fowler, Patrick McGrath and Lorrie Moore, and included a visit to the great novelist Doris Lessing by a young, reverential Oates (especially her surprise to note that Lessing had no sense of her own greatness. I savored the 'meta' quality of this vintage piece, as now Oates is in the position where Lessing was, and looking out herself through the windows of greatness). Her review of NW by Zadie Smith was exceptional, and I cannot wait to get my hands on it--the friendship between two girls from a multi-ethnic public housing project in NW London, and how their future selves' relationship and identities continue to be affected by their experiences there.
Reviews are as personal as essays, and I learned much about Oates' sense of what a great work is as she reviewed these books. Her take on Lucia Berlin’s gorgeous short story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women was highly instructive. Oates felt the works were largely sketches rather than fully realized short stories capable of standing on their own—gave me a sense of what JCO thinks of as a short story. She felt the collection was more a novel in stories—or an autobiography in stories--where the impact comes through the resonances of one story building on the other stories, that the work as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts--the opposite of many a collection, where the stories look good published on their own, but taken together disappoint, bearing too many similiarities and repetition, basically the same story with a different hairdo.
I was surprised to discover I did love her pieces on boxing--one on Mike Tyson's autobiography, one straight essay on Muhammed Ali, and a review of the movie The Fighter-- a flavor of candy I hadn't expected to enjoy.
But my absolute favorite piece in of the collection was a long review of an eccentric biography of Joan Didion, “The Last Love Song” by Tracy Daughtery, which naturaly became a discussion of Didion’s art form, and to see one of my literary heroes discuss the work of another literary hero was the biggest chocolate truffle of all. Oates’s understanding of Didion’s art was clearly a critique assembled from forty years of reading, and it becomes a three way discussion with the biographer’s own take. She finds the biographer himself has taken on the style of his subject, which would be a good subject for fiction itself.
I found these essays well-written, all subjects of passionate interest to their author. However, like a candy sampler, each person is going to find things they want to spit out. I for one don't care for coconut-- nor Lovecraft, nor an offbeat biographical novel of Emily Dickinson as adventurer. I put those back, half-eaten. I ate half of an essay about Margaret Atwood's thoughts on speculative fiction/sci fi and JCO's thoughts on same.
For me the collection really heated up in her reviews of contemporary fiction, both when they concerned books I’d read, and equally those I had not. It's a pleasure to read reviews of books one has read and and subject one knows well--to compare one's own responses with those of such a extremely keen-eyed, deep-thinking guide as Oates—but also a pleasure to read about books one is unlikely to ever open. A well-done review can give you a taste of that work, a flavor of that subject, expanding your world despite yourself.
My favorite offerings—the chocolate toffees, the caramels and truffles—were the reviews of works by contemporary writers Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Drabble, Louise Erdrich, Karen Joy Fowler, Patrick McGrath and Lorrie Moore, and included a visit to the great novelist Doris Lessing by a young, reverential Oates (especially her surprise to note that Lessing had no sense of her own greatness. I savored the 'meta' quality of this vintage piece, as now Oates is in the position where Lessing was, and looking out herself through the windows of greatness). Her review of NW by Zadie Smith was exceptional, and I cannot wait to get my hands on it--the friendship between two girls from a multi-ethnic public housing project in NW London, and how their future selves' relationship and identities continue to be affected by their experiences there.
Reviews are as personal as essays, and I learned much about Oates' sense of what a great work is as she reviewed these books. Her take on Lucia Berlin’s gorgeous short story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women was highly instructive. Oates felt the works were largely sketches rather than fully realized short stories capable of standing on their own—gave me a sense of what JCO thinks of as a short story. She felt the collection was more a novel in stories—or an autobiography in stories--where the impact comes through the resonances of one story building on the other stories, that the work as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts--the opposite of many a collection, where the stories look good published on their own, but taken together disappoint, bearing too many similiarities and repetition, basically the same story with a different hairdo.
I was surprised to discover I did love her pieces on boxing--one on Mike Tyson's autobiography, one straight essay on Muhammed Ali, and a review of the movie The Fighter-- a flavor of candy I hadn't expected to enjoy.
But my absolute favorite piece in of the collection was a long review of an eccentric biography of Joan Didion, “The Last Love Song” by Tracy Daughtery, which naturaly became a discussion of Didion’s art form, and to see one of my literary heroes discuss the work of another literary hero was the biggest chocolate truffle of all. Oates’s understanding of Didion’s art was clearly a critique assembled from forty years of reading, and it becomes a three way discussion with the biographer’s own take. She finds the biographer himself has taken on the style of his subject, which would be a good subject for fiction itself.
Read
February 4, 2019SO thoughtful and rewarding - one of our greatest living writers is also, unsurprisingly, one of our greatest readers
September 21, 2017
This book is a treat for writers; written by a prolific writer, analytical reader, and dedicated teacher of the craft.
Having made that pitch however, I would like to qualify that this book also appears to be a loose collection of essays and reviews, previously published in journals and newspapers, that have been put together in a rather disjointed three-part anthology to add another book to her considerable oeuvre.
In the first part—the best part for me—we explore the writing life. The central question here is whether it is the observed and experienced life that informs our writing or are we guided by some supernatural muse? The author seems to believe that both points of view hold depending on the work being created, and on the particular writer.
The second part, which forms the bulk of the book, is comprised of essays and reviews of books and authors that Oates has either been commissioned to write about or ones that have caught her particular fancy. There is no particular theme here, the authors under her microscope come from both sides of the Atlantic (I didn’t see any from Latin America or Asia): Simenon, Updike, Lessing, Coetzee, Barnes, Drabble, Didion, Atwood and Amis, and some lesser known ones like Patrick McGrath, Janette Winterson, Lucia Berlin and Jerome Charyn (at least, lesser known to me, but now placed on my to-be-read list, thanks to this book). The genres range from crime to gothic, to memoir, to suburban, to satire, to indigenous, to the old western. The insight and commentary Oates brings to these works and to their creators is commendable. Towards the end of this part of the book we drift from the literary greats to three pieces about boxing; the subjects are Mike Tyson, Micky Ward, and Muhammad Ali. These boxing pieces are written as if by a sports reporter rather than a professor of literature, and I marvelled at Oates’ grasp of the sport. I learned a few things too: Simenon characterized himself as a psychopath; in England writers tend to work in publishing houses while in America they work in college creative writing programs; Joan Didion’s protagonists in her novels are all, well...Joan Didion; champion boxers make millions for others and often end up in debt.
The final part, another departure from the first two, details a guided tour of San Quentin Prison, including a “walk around the block” of overcrowded Cell Block C, a flit past Death Row, and a visit to the execution room to peer into the murky bell chamber where the condemned are either gassed, electrocuted or lethally injected depending on what disposal method has been sanctioned at the time. You get to sit in the front row seats which are reserved for the families of the victims so that they can put closure to their loss. We learn that new inmates must join one of the inside gangs for their own safety, and that COs (Corrections Officers) help fuel the drug business inside and smuggle in the “tools” for the inmates to practice their trade. “Do not look,” “Stay away from the bars” and other commands issued by the tour guide create a sense of fear and a dividing line between those on the outside and the incarcerated. It is as if when a convicted person enters San Quentin he loses all humanity and becomes another species, never to return to the old life again. A very scary piece to end this book, but given Oates’ penchant for the gothic, it has her stamp all over it.
I got the sense in reading this collection that Oates is now at a point in her career where she does not need to care for structure and coherence. The depths of her insights are sufficient to hold our interest, hence this rambling book where every chapter is a new gem, to be read with great interest.
Having made that pitch however, I would like to qualify that this book also appears to be a loose collection of essays and reviews, previously published in journals and newspapers, that have been put together in a rather disjointed three-part anthology to add another book to her considerable oeuvre.
In the first part—the best part for me—we explore the writing life. The central question here is whether it is the observed and experienced life that informs our writing or are we guided by some supernatural muse? The author seems to believe that both points of view hold depending on the work being created, and on the particular writer.
The second part, which forms the bulk of the book, is comprised of essays and reviews of books and authors that Oates has either been commissioned to write about or ones that have caught her particular fancy. There is no particular theme here, the authors under her microscope come from both sides of the Atlantic (I didn’t see any from Latin America or Asia): Simenon, Updike, Lessing, Coetzee, Barnes, Drabble, Didion, Atwood and Amis, and some lesser known ones like Patrick McGrath, Janette Winterson, Lucia Berlin and Jerome Charyn (at least, lesser known to me, but now placed on my to-be-read list, thanks to this book). The genres range from crime to gothic, to memoir, to suburban, to satire, to indigenous, to the old western. The insight and commentary Oates brings to these works and to their creators is commendable. Towards the end of this part of the book we drift from the literary greats to three pieces about boxing; the subjects are Mike Tyson, Micky Ward, and Muhammad Ali. These boxing pieces are written as if by a sports reporter rather than a professor of literature, and I marvelled at Oates’ grasp of the sport. I learned a few things too: Simenon characterized himself as a psychopath; in England writers tend to work in publishing houses while in America they work in college creative writing programs; Joan Didion’s protagonists in her novels are all, well...Joan Didion; champion boxers make millions for others and often end up in debt.
The final part, another departure from the first two, details a guided tour of San Quentin Prison, including a “walk around the block” of overcrowded Cell Block C, a flit past Death Row, and a visit to the execution room to peer into the murky bell chamber where the condemned are either gassed, electrocuted or lethally injected depending on what disposal method has been sanctioned at the time. You get to sit in the front row seats which are reserved for the families of the victims so that they can put closure to their loss. We learn that new inmates must join one of the inside gangs for their own safety, and that COs (Corrections Officers) help fuel the drug business inside and smuggle in the “tools” for the inmates to practice their trade. “Do not look,” “Stay away from the bars” and other commands issued by the tour guide create a sense of fear and a dividing line between those on the outside and the incarcerated. It is as if when a convicted person enters San Quentin he loses all humanity and becomes another species, never to return to the old life again. A very scary piece to end this book, but given Oates’ penchant for the gothic, it has her stamp all over it.
I got the sense in reading this collection that Oates is now at a point in her career where she does not need to care for structure and coherence. The depths of her insights are sufficient to hold our interest, hence this rambling book where every chapter is a new gem, to be read with great interest.
September 30, 2016
Oates' new collection of essays - a compilation of her more recent literary criticism-essays (classics and contemporary authors) and some texts on the writing life - focusses on her quest to understand the source of a writer's inspiration, while analyzing and srutinizing her own writing and that of others. For fans of JCO and those who love to read thorough, in-depth essays about books and writing.
May 25, 2017
Is the uninspired life worth living? What are the five motives for writing? Let’s talk about the anatomy of a story. And, what kind of writing room do you have? This is the opening of an amazing book about writing, creativity, process, the Muse, and the human imagination. Not a fast read, I will tell you because you need to read it carefully to fully absorb. Perfect for writing teachers, serious writers, and students of literature who want an intimate perspective about Charles Dickens, Lovecraft and Poe, John Updike or a visit with Doris Lessing. Contemporary authors take up a major part of the book: Louise Erdrich, Anne Tyler, Margaret Drabble, Joan Didion, Edna O’Brien and more. This is a resource book that reads as lectures, essays, criticisms exploring the act and purpose of writing of so many authors we all admire. But, I actually found Oates' The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art to be more enjoyable, personal, and inspiring. I read Soul at the White Heat from my local library.
September 11, 2016
"The three saddest words in the English language: Joyce Carol Oates." Gore Vidal said this, apparently. Vidal was often bitter and nasty and unfair, but I think I know what Vidal means. Take the title of this book: "Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life." Sad sad sad. The first, "soul" part is a quote from Emily Dickinson. The "inspiration" part is sheer Poets 'n' Writers magazine schlock. So what have we here? The back jacket blurb says it is "an imaginative exploration of the writing life, and all its attendant anxieties, joys in futilities, in this new collection of seminal essays and criticism." Not sure what is seminal about these, but most of them appeared in New York Review of Books. That in itself is kind of sad. Basically this is a collection of essays and reviews written over the past few years, tarted up to make a back cover blurb like this plausible.
Which is another way of saying that some "imaginative exploration(s) of the writing life" front matter is tacked on to a collection of reviews and essays. Pages 3-47 consist of a section called "The Writing Life" which appears to be bits Oates has assembled when asked about writing. She gets asked about this all the time, I'm sure. It is a most unpromising start to this book, as it reveals her Poets 'n' Writers proclivities, those writing life clichés such as what it was Emily Dickinson was doing with her soul in a white heat up there in her bedroom and how cool it is that Plato banished poets from the Commonwealth because they are so dangerous (writers love this bit of philosophical flattery). Oates gives us tired old stories about Herman Melville (destroyed by his own whale) and George Eliot (a woman transformed by love) and Henry James (repressed) and Mary Shelley and Frankenstein (she was a teenager). You've heard 'em before, I skimmed 'em again here because they are the kind of stories writers tell themselves to ward off death and obscurity. The usual worthies from her generation are automatically praised: John Updike and E. L. Doctrow, etc. Authorial profundities are released:
"Without the stillness, thoughtfulness, and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture - no collective memory; as, if memory is destroyed in the human brain, our identities corrode, and we "are" no one -- we become merely a shifting succession of impressions attached to no fixed source." (p. 31).
Ah, art has "depths" and "ceaseless moral rigors." Those are good things, right? These are true things, right? These are things people say at PEN meetings and write in blurbs, right? It's not that I disagree with these sentiments, it is just that they are so self-righteous, so self-evident and so bullet-proof that they don't really add anything to anything. And such sentiments ignore the controversies, the doubts and existential threats to the old ideas about "shared culture."
It gets worse in "The Writing Room," a testament to just how darned chipper and productive Joyce Carol Oates is. She tells us she struggles, of course, but she is pretty pleased with things, mostly:
"Bookshelves contain copies of most of the books I have written from 1963 onward, along with selected paperback editions. how stunned I would have been to imagine, at the outset of my writing life, that, in time, I would write so many books! -- when each day's work, each hour's work, feels so anxiously wrought and hard-won."
After this bit of gloating (not just "books" on those sagging shelves, but "selected paperback editions" as well - what's the diff? - as in so many places in this book, distinctions are not made clear), Oates gives us a glimpse of where all those stunning books come from:
"My writing begins in "long-hand" sketches and notes. Ideally, I write in this way seated at my beautifully carved little "antique" table where I can gaze dreamily toward the creek/lake in the near distance and be distracted by the activities of myriad birds at the feeders below. (Red cardinals in the snow are the heart's delight!). My larger and more utilitarian desk contains my laptop and it's here that I type seriously, often for hours; invariable I am expanding upon ideas that I've written by hand, in what is called, quaintly, "cursive" -- soon to be a lost or even secret skill, like Gaelic." (p. 47)
My copy of this book is an uncorrected proof, so perhaps some of this will get cleaned up, but what is with the quotation marks around "long-hand," "antique" and "cursive"? Does the "antique" table have an iffy provenance? Shouldn't "longhand" be spelt as one word? Does a desk really "contain" a laptop? Is "heart's delight" the best thing she could come up with for those cardinals - wouldn't most writers throw up in their mouths a little after typing this? Creek/lake - what is this? - I know the definitions of both words, but why such an abbreviated, sketchy way of putting it from a writer who's written entire forests worth of fiction full of lakes and creeks and scads of other natural phenomenon? The cursive-Gaelic comparison is not really apt, is it? Shouldn't a writer talking about how she writes write about it...better?
Right from the start of this tome we have Joyce Carol Oates, one of our contemporary Great Writers, typing away like a blogger. And it is not just in the beginning section of the book, where a casual, sloppy approach might be excused, where Oates tendency to scribble like a word-count mad journalist from 1899. In the heart of the book - the already published reviews of "classics" and "contemporaries" the inanities crop up all over the place:
"How rare to encounter, in life or literature, a person for whom the mental life, the thinking life, is so suffused with drama as Lovecraft." (sic) (p. 89)
"These three beautifully produced and exhaustively researched "coffee table" books, each by way of Yale University Press, weigh in at over thirteen pounds in all and are not for the faint of heart or the casual browser..." (p. 97)
"Quite apart from his creative gifts, Stieglitz had a perhaps equally rare charismatic gift for gathering first-rate artists to him (sic?), showcasing and selling their art, persuading wealthy collectors to collect them, and creating "public relations" for photography as a new, vital exciting art-form very different from ordinary "picture-taking."" (p. 105)
"These are not special people, (Anne) Tyler insists; they are not even "interesting" people in the sense in which most (fictitious) people are "interesting." (For why write about them otherwise? Only the genius of a Samuel Beckett can transform a mundane subject matter into gold, through the singularity of style.)" (p. 241)
"In these early novels, written under the inspired influence of Eudora Welty, (Anne) Tyler's characters are magical without being whimsical or fey; even when down on their luck, they seem to inhabit enchanted realms of the spirit..." (p. 243)
So many things go wrong here. The random acts of putting words in quotation marks. Lovecraft's mental (or, and this is in italics in her original, thinking) life was indeed filled with drama, but I am not sure how rare such drama is. Nor do I know what a non-thinking life consists of. There are botched definitions - if a "coffee table" book is not for "the casual browser," then why are they called coffee table books? There are dabs of book blurb afflatus: "singularity of style" and "enchanted realms of the spirit." There are broad, unsupported critical claims easily rebuffed: surely Samuel Beckett is not the only writer who transformed "mundane subject matter into gold," which in any case is a kinda ho-hum thing to say anyway. The Stieglitz paragraph sags under a combination of banality, iffy syntax, art-crit clichés, and, again, pointless quotation marks.
Another problem is taste and taste is subjective. Oates seems to have a hankering for rather trashy stuff. Although Dickinson, Melville, Hawthorne, etc. are mentioned approvingly (perhaps reflexively) throughout the book, two of the reviews make energetic and unconvincing cases for H. P. Lovecraft and Georges Simenon. For years I was a devotee of Lovecraft, but this was when I was a teenager. He has his value, to be sure, but his prose is just awful for some grownups, and Oates' choice of quotations do not make her case ("...But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous" (quoted on p. 78)). I find W. G. Sebald, Alice Munro and Penelope Fitzgerald to be far more terrifying than Lovecraft these days, which is why I stopped reading Lovecraft after my teenage years. As for Simenon, I am quite ignorant about the man and his works (I seem to recall a New Yorker profile years ago, probably in 2003 at his centenary). But as with Lovecraft, I just can't get past the awful quotes ("...the soaring blocks of blackened houses between which the train was threading its way, with hundreds and thousands of windows open or closed, linen hanging out, aerials, a prodigious accumulation, in breadth and in height, of teeming lives, from which the train suddenly broke away after a glimpse of the last green-and-white bus in a street that already seemed like a highway." (from Monsieur Monde Vanishes, quoted on p. 111)). Maybe something is lost in translation here, but no thank you. Although I applaud reviews straying outside the canon, the appeal needs to be made with some eye on the actual words set down on paper. Lovecraft is worth the awful prose because of his effective atmospherics and zany mythologies (perhaps the same could be said of Tolkien). Cases can be made for such authors, but, again, they are not made here.
It's not all bad. Oates takes more care (and, I'm guessing, time) on some pieces than she does on others. The review-essays on Lorrie Moore and Lucia Berlin were competent and made me want to seek out these authors (I immediately picked up Moore's collection Bark and found it to be very good indeed, if not exactly for the reasons Oates thinks it is). Oates on Mike Tyson was competent and revealed Oates' sympathetic yet passionate and refreshingly non-PC interest in boxing. There is another boxing piece, the collections sole movie review - The Fighter by David O. Russell - it too is interesting if sometimes incoherent and, as the rest of the book, plagued with dabs of off-kilter banality: "In professional boxing, most boxers are burnt out by thirty and in risk of serious injury" (p. 363). Well, no, I'd say boxers face risk of serious injury at any age and virtually all athletes are on the wane at 30 - this is the kind of "insight" (deliberate scare quotes used here to signal irony) that makes up the bulk of this book not taken up with plot summaries and other book report matters.
Oates saves the worst for last. In a real show of editorial poor judgment, there is a final section, "IV Real Life" that consists of a single essay "A Visit to San Quentin." This was written, hastily I'm certain, for something called Better Than Fiction: True Travel Tales (Lonely Planet). It's a real stinker. Here are some especially awful bits at the start of it:
"On the morning we drove to San Quentin from Berkeley, the sky was vivid-blue and the air in continual gusts. The hills beyond the prison were vivid-green from an unusually wet and protracted Northern California winter." (p. 373)
Vivid-blue and vivid-green; how evocative. What, really, is "the air in continual gusts"? There is nothing vivid about this. And I think a verb is missing.
"In San Quentin you are forbidden to bring many things designated as "contraband" and you are forbidden to wear certain colors -- (primarily blue, the prisoners' color). Even men must not wear "open" shoes, i.e., sandals, Your arms must be covered, and clothing "appropriate."" (p. 374)
More bizarre use of quotation marks, more stuff that's not-quite-right. I mean, I am guessing that not "many" things but rather "all" things designated as contraband are forbidden at San Quentin. "Primarily blue" - what other colors? And by "colors" does she mean the gang colors or the prison uniforms? "Open" shoes and "appropriate" clothing, yes, we get it, therefore they do not require quotation marks - these are American terms cats and dogs can understand and I fail how their use at San Quentin is different than anywhere else.
"Our tour guide was late. From remarks told to us, the man's "lateness" was a matter of his own discretion: he was not often "on time." There was the sense, communicated to us subtly by guards, that civilians were not particularly welcome in the facility; it was a "favor" to the public, that guided tours were arranged from time to time. And so we were made to wait in the sunny, gusty air outside the first checkpoint, which was both a vehicular and a pedestrian checkpoint manned by a number of guards.
In the imagination a prison is a remote and lonely place but in reality, a prison is a place of business: a busy place. Delivery vehicles constantly arrived to move through the checkpoint. Corrections officer and other employees arrived. When at last our tour leader arrived, a lieutenant corrections officer, we were led singly through the pedestrian checkpoint and along a hilly pavement in the direction of the prison..." (375)
I really couldn't believe how bad these two paragraphs were. "Remarks" were "told to us" - that's the only way to convey a remark, as far as I know. The "lateness" was a matter of "his own discretion" - what does that mean? Why the colon and the pointless explanation that "lateness" is pretty much the same thing as "not often on time"? "Gusty air" again. I doubt prison tours are a "favor" granted - my guess is the prisons are compelled to allow VIP/academic access by law or directive (a bit of research would've been nice here). The flatness of "which was both a vehicular and a pedestrian checkpoint manned by a number of guards" is such that I could almost see Oates watching the word counter on her computer spinning ever upwards. In that last paragraph, note the three plodding uses of the word "arrived" - perhaps an argument could be made that she was trying something stylish here - the monotony of prison arrivals - but it reads to me like a hack journalist slamming carelessly through an assignment on autopilot at 80-words-a-minute. What in this world or the next is a "hilly pavement"?
The San Quentin piece suffers from comparison to another essay she wrote on a prison visit Oates made in the 1980s in New Jersey. The New Jersey piece, which I happened to read (not in this collection) recently, while not brilliant, was far, far better than her San Quentin account. Actual details of people and places were developed, not just sketched. I felt some of the terror Oates felt - a terror she conveyed in the New Jersey piece through careful composition and attention to detail - rather than just crudely jabbering at the reader the way she writes up San Quentin. Some forty years separate the two works. So perhaps the problem here is a writer aging, a writer in decline. This is an unavoidable thing, for sure, and yet aging writers, like aging athletes, can adapt to declining powers by evolving new strategies, replacing raw talent with experience and cunning. As a boxing fan, Oates must be aware of this.
***
As mentioned above, my copy of this book is an uncorrected proof. Perhaps some of this stuff will get cleaned up, but contemporary standards of book editing being what they are, I doubt it. But beyond the prose infelicities and errors, this whole production is troubling. Do our older famous writers feel they have to crank out this sort of thing just to be part of the culture's overwhelming din? Shouldn't they know better? Joyce Carol Oates should know better. This book is amateurish. Much of the time I "felt" like a weary high school "English" teacher grading a "portfolio" of "extra credit" essays by the smart sophomore "kid" who is trying like hell to be "Valedictorian" upon graduation.
Of course Oates has been criticized for over-producing for years. In her 1976 Paris Review interview, she defends herself thusly:
"Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones—just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one…Yet each book is a world unto itself and must stand alone, and it should not matter whether a book is a writer's first, or tenth, or fiftieth." (Paris Review website)
I disagree and agree. Time and time again writers damage their own legacy by overproducing - especially in 20th century America where publishing can be so easy. Those writers and poets who publish work slowly and at long intervals tend to endure - think of poets T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Philip Larkin and their small, but exquisite bodies of work. Then think of the slovenly sprawl of Ted Hughes, late John Berryman, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton - great poems in there, but what a mass of sterile rocks you have to break to get to the ore. Yeah, each book is “a world unto itself.” But shouldn’t each book – especially one by such an esteemed author, an author who repeatedly says profound stuff about writing as a sacred calling, etc. – be at least competently written? The title page states that Joyce Carol Oates wrote the essays and occasional pieces in this collection, but I would be very much surprised that she read any of them once they left the smoking hot platen of her over-worked typewriter. Surely not! How could she let so many infelicities and outright errors be “enshrined” (scare quotes deliberate; intended to convey irony and dismay) in a collection such as this one?
Furthermore, you just know Oates can do better than this; the best of her fiction provides abundant evidence of this. Which leads to the question as to whether an author can be expected to give her best effort all the time, or should be cut some critical slack when writing occasional pieces, reviews, journalism, Tweets, etc.? Quite by accident, just before reading Soul at the White Heat, I came across another local library discard, a pretty much forgotten book by Anthony Burgess called Urgent Copy (1966), a collection of his journalism. In the introduction Burgess apologizes for the journalistic aspects of his pieces – too brief, written in haste and, admittedly, for money. No need to apologize, Mr. Burgess! The book was wonderful and I’d recommend it to anyone – a testament to mid-Twentieth Century literary culture at its (non-academic, non-theoretical, non-Twitter, non-blogging) best. In scope and approach – contemporary literary/social criticism - Burgess’s book is much like Oates’, but the overall composition, editing, style, critical insight and intellectual verve are all worlds beyond what Oates gives us here. So what happened in the past 50 years? Oates is old enough to know better, as she had already embarked on her enormous career by 1966 and had surely read Burgess's book. She should read it again. And slow down. And find an editor allergic to "quotation" marks.
Which is another way of saying that some "imaginative exploration(s) of the writing life" front matter is tacked on to a collection of reviews and essays. Pages 3-47 consist of a section called "The Writing Life" which appears to be bits Oates has assembled when asked about writing. She gets asked about this all the time, I'm sure. It is a most unpromising start to this book, as it reveals her Poets 'n' Writers proclivities, those writing life clichés such as what it was Emily Dickinson was doing with her soul in a white heat up there in her bedroom and how cool it is that Plato banished poets from the Commonwealth because they are so dangerous (writers love this bit of philosophical flattery). Oates gives us tired old stories about Herman Melville (destroyed by his own whale) and George Eliot (a woman transformed by love) and Henry James (repressed) and Mary Shelley and Frankenstein (she was a teenager). You've heard 'em before, I skimmed 'em again here because they are the kind of stories writers tell themselves to ward off death and obscurity. The usual worthies from her generation are automatically praised: John Updike and E. L. Doctrow, etc. Authorial profundities are released:
"Without the stillness, thoughtfulness, and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture - no collective memory; as, if memory is destroyed in the human brain, our identities corrode, and we "are" no one -- we become merely a shifting succession of impressions attached to no fixed source." (p. 31).
Ah, art has "depths" and "ceaseless moral rigors." Those are good things, right? These are true things, right? These are things people say at PEN meetings and write in blurbs, right? It's not that I disagree with these sentiments, it is just that they are so self-righteous, so self-evident and so bullet-proof that they don't really add anything to anything. And such sentiments ignore the controversies, the doubts and existential threats to the old ideas about "shared culture."
It gets worse in "The Writing Room," a testament to just how darned chipper and productive Joyce Carol Oates is. She tells us she struggles, of course, but she is pretty pleased with things, mostly:
"Bookshelves contain copies of most of the books I have written from 1963 onward, along with selected paperback editions. how stunned I would have been to imagine, at the outset of my writing life, that, in time, I would write so many books! -- when each day's work, each hour's work, feels so anxiously wrought and hard-won."
After this bit of gloating (not just "books" on those sagging shelves, but "selected paperback editions" as well - what's the diff? - as in so many places in this book, distinctions are not made clear), Oates gives us a glimpse of where all those stunning books come from:
"My writing begins in "long-hand" sketches and notes. Ideally, I write in this way seated at my beautifully carved little "antique" table where I can gaze dreamily toward the creek/lake in the near distance and be distracted by the activities of myriad birds at the feeders below. (Red cardinals in the snow are the heart's delight!). My larger and more utilitarian desk contains my laptop and it's here that I type seriously, often for hours; invariable I am expanding upon ideas that I've written by hand, in what is called, quaintly, "cursive" -- soon to be a lost or even secret skill, like Gaelic." (p. 47)
My copy of this book is an uncorrected proof, so perhaps some of this will get cleaned up, but what is with the quotation marks around "long-hand," "antique" and "cursive"? Does the "antique" table have an iffy provenance? Shouldn't "longhand" be spelt as one word? Does a desk really "contain" a laptop? Is "heart's delight" the best thing she could come up with for those cardinals - wouldn't most writers throw up in their mouths a little after typing this? Creek/lake - what is this? - I know the definitions of both words, but why such an abbreviated, sketchy way of putting it from a writer who's written entire forests worth of fiction full of lakes and creeks and scads of other natural phenomenon? The cursive-Gaelic comparison is not really apt, is it? Shouldn't a writer talking about how she writes write about it...better?
Right from the start of this tome we have Joyce Carol Oates, one of our contemporary Great Writers, typing away like a blogger. And it is not just in the beginning section of the book, where a casual, sloppy approach might be excused, where Oates tendency to scribble like a word-count mad journalist from 1899. In the heart of the book - the already published reviews of "classics" and "contemporaries" the inanities crop up all over the place:
"How rare to encounter, in life or literature, a person for whom the mental life, the thinking life, is so suffused with drama as Lovecraft." (sic) (p. 89)
"These three beautifully produced and exhaustively researched "coffee table" books, each by way of Yale University Press, weigh in at over thirteen pounds in all and are not for the faint of heart or the casual browser..." (p. 97)
"Quite apart from his creative gifts, Stieglitz had a perhaps equally rare charismatic gift for gathering first-rate artists to him (sic?), showcasing and selling their art, persuading wealthy collectors to collect them, and creating "public relations" for photography as a new, vital exciting art-form very different from ordinary "picture-taking."" (p. 105)
"These are not special people, (Anne) Tyler insists; they are not even "interesting" people in the sense in which most (fictitious) people are "interesting." (For why write about them otherwise? Only the genius of a Samuel Beckett can transform a mundane subject matter into gold, through the singularity of style.)" (p. 241)
"In these early novels, written under the inspired influence of Eudora Welty, (Anne) Tyler's characters are magical without being whimsical or fey; even when down on their luck, they seem to inhabit enchanted realms of the spirit..." (p. 243)
So many things go wrong here. The random acts of putting words in quotation marks. Lovecraft's mental (or, and this is in italics in her original, thinking) life was indeed filled with drama, but I am not sure how rare such drama is. Nor do I know what a non-thinking life consists of. There are botched definitions - if a "coffee table" book is not for "the casual browser," then why are they called coffee table books? There are dabs of book blurb afflatus: "singularity of style" and "enchanted realms of the spirit." There are broad, unsupported critical claims easily rebuffed: surely Samuel Beckett is not the only writer who transformed "mundane subject matter into gold," which in any case is a kinda ho-hum thing to say anyway. The Stieglitz paragraph sags under a combination of banality, iffy syntax, art-crit clichés, and, again, pointless quotation marks.
Another problem is taste and taste is subjective. Oates seems to have a hankering for rather trashy stuff. Although Dickinson, Melville, Hawthorne, etc. are mentioned approvingly (perhaps reflexively) throughout the book, two of the reviews make energetic and unconvincing cases for H. P. Lovecraft and Georges Simenon. For years I was a devotee of Lovecraft, but this was when I was a teenager. He has his value, to be sure, but his prose is just awful for some grownups, and Oates' choice of quotations do not make her case ("...But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous" (quoted on p. 78)). I find W. G. Sebald, Alice Munro and Penelope Fitzgerald to be far more terrifying than Lovecraft these days, which is why I stopped reading Lovecraft after my teenage years. As for Simenon, I am quite ignorant about the man and his works (I seem to recall a New Yorker profile years ago, probably in 2003 at his centenary). But as with Lovecraft, I just can't get past the awful quotes ("...the soaring blocks of blackened houses between which the train was threading its way, with hundreds and thousands of windows open or closed, linen hanging out, aerials, a prodigious accumulation, in breadth and in height, of teeming lives, from which the train suddenly broke away after a glimpse of the last green-and-white bus in a street that already seemed like a highway." (from Monsieur Monde Vanishes, quoted on p. 111)). Maybe something is lost in translation here, but no thank you. Although I applaud reviews straying outside the canon, the appeal needs to be made with some eye on the actual words set down on paper. Lovecraft is worth the awful prose because of his effective atmospherics and zany mythologies (perhaps the same could be said of Tolkien). Cases can be made for such authors, but, again, they are not made here.
It's not all bad. Oates takes more care (and, I'm guessing, time) on some pieces than she does on others. The review-essays on Lorrie Moore and Lucia Berlin were competent and made me want to seek out these authors (I immediately picked up Moore's collection Bark and found it to be very good indeed, if not exactly for the reasons Oates thinks it is). Oates on Mike Tyson was competent and revealed Oates' sympathetic yet passionate and refreshingly non-PC interest in boxing. There is another boxing piece, the collections sole movie review - The Fighter by David O. Russell - it too is interesting if sometimes incoherent and, as the rest of the book, plagued with dabs of off-kilter banality: "In professional boxing, most boxers are burnt out by thirty and in risk of serious injury" (p. 363). Well, no, I'd say boxers face risk of serious injury at any age and virtually all athletes are on the wane at 30 - this is the kind of "insight" (deliberate scare quotes used here to signal irony) that makes up the bulk of this book not taken up with plot summaries and other book report matters.
Oates saves the worst for last. In a real show of editorial poor judgment, there is a final section, "IV Real Life" that consists of a single essay "A Visit to San Quentin." This was written, hastily I'm certain, for something called Better Than Fiction: True Travel Tales (Lonely Planet). It's a real stinker. Here are some especially awful bits at the start of it:
"On the morning we drove to San Quentin from Berkeley, the sky was vivid-blue and the air in continual gusts. The hills beyond the prison were vivid-green from an unusually wet and protracted Northern California winter." (p. 373)
Vivid-blue and vivid-green; how evocative. What, really, is "the air in continual gusts"? There is nothing vivid about this. And I think a verb is missing.
"In San Quentin you are forbidden to bring many things designated as "contraband" and you are forbidden to wear certain colors -- (primarily blue, the prisoners' color). Even men must not wear "open" shoes, i.e., sandals, Your arms must be covered, and clothing "appropriate."" (p. 374)
More bizarre use of quotation marks, more stuff that's not-quite-right. I mean, I am guessing that not "many" things but rather "all" things designated as contraband are forbidden at San Quentin. "Primarily blue" - what other colors? And by "colors" does she mean the gang colors or the prison uniforms? "Open" shoes and "appropriate" clothing, yes, we get it, therefore they do not require quotation marks - these are American terms cats and dogs can understand and I fail how their use at San Quentin is different than anywhere else.
"Our tour guide was late. From remarks told to us, the man's "lateness" was a matter of his own discretion: he was not often "on time." There was the sense, communicated to us subtly by guards, that civilians were not particularly welcome in the facility; it was a "favor" to the public, that guided tours were arranged from time to time. And so we were made to wait in the sunny, gusty air outside the first checkpoint, which was both a vehicular and a pedestrian checkpoint manned by a number of guards.
In the imagination a prison is a remote and lonely place but in reality, a prison is a place of business: a busy place. Delivery vehicles constantly arrived to move through the checkpoint. Corrections officer and other employees arrived. When at last our tour leader arrived, a lieutenant corrections officer, we were led singly through the pedestrian checkpoint and along a hilly pavement in the direction of the prison..." (375)
I really couldn't believe how bad these two paragraphs were. "Remarks" were "told to us" - that's the only way to convey a remark, as far as I know. The "lateness" was a matter of "his own discretion" - what does that mean? Why the colon and the pointless explanation that "lateness" is pretty much the same thing as "not often on time"? "Gusty air" again. I doubt prison tours are a "favor" granted - my guess is the prisons are compelled to allow VIP/academic access by law or directive (a bit of research would've been nice here). The flatness of "which was both a vehicular and a pedestrian checkpoint manned by a number of guards" is such that I could almost see Oates watching the word counter on her computer spinning ever upwards. In that last paragraph, note the three plodding uses of the word "arrived" - perhaps an argument could be made that she was trying something stylish here - the monotony of prison arrivals - but it reads to me like a hack journalist slamming carelessly through an assignment on autopilot at 80-words-a-minute. What in this world or the next is a "hilly pavement"?
The San Quentin piece suffers from comparison to another essay she wrote on a prison visit Oates made in the 1980s in New Jersey. The New Jersey piece, which I happened to read (not in this collection) recently, while not brilliant, was far, far better than her San Quentin account. Actual details of people and places were developed, not just sketched. I felt some of the terror Oates felt - a terror she conveyed in the New Jersey piece through careful composition and attention to detail - rather than just crudely jabbering at the reader the way she writes up San Quentin. Some forty years separate the two works. So perhaps the problem here is a writer aging, a writer in decline. This is an unavoidable thing, for sure, and yet aging writers, like aging athletes, can adapt to declining powers by evolving new strategies, replacing raw talent with experience and cunning. As a boxing fan, Oates must be aware of this.
***
As mentioned above, my copy of this book is an uncorrected proof. Perhaps some of this stuff will get cleaned up, but contemporary standards of book editing being what they are, I doubt it. But beyond the prose infelicities and errors, this whole production is troubling. Do our older famous writers feel they have to crank out this sort of thing just to be part of the culture's overwhelming din? Shouldn't they know better? Joyce Carol Oates should know better. This book is amateurish. Much of the time I "felt" like a weary high school "English" teacher grading a "portfolio" of "extra credit" essays by the smart sophomore "kid" who is trying like hell to be "Valedictorian" upon graduation.
Of course Oates has been criticized for over-producing for years. In her 1976 Paris Review interview, she defends herself thusly:
"Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones—just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one…Yet each book is a world unto itself and must stand alone, and it should not matter whether a book is a writer's first, or tenth, or fiftieth." (Paris Review website)
I disagree and agree. Time and time again writers damage their own legacy by overproducing - especially in 20th century America where publishing can be so easy. Those writers and poets who publish work slowly and at long intervals tend to endure - think of poets T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Philip Larkin and their small, but exquisite bodies of work. Then think of the slovenly sprawl of Ted Hughes, late John Berryman, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton - great poems in there, but what a mass of sterile rocks you have to break to get to the ore. Yeah, each book is “a world unto itself.” But shouldn’t each book – especially one by such an esteemed author, an author who repeatedly says profound stuff about writing as a sacred calling, etc. – be at least competently written? The title page states that Joyce Carol Oates wrote the essays and occasional pieces in this collection, but I would be very much surprised that she read any of them once they left the smoking hot platen of her over-worked typewriter. Surely not! How could she let so many infelicities and outright errors be “enshrined” (scare quotes deliberate; intended to convey irony and dismay) in a collection such as this one?
Furthermore, you just know Oates can do better than this; the best of her fiction provides abundant evidence of this. Which leads to the question as to whether an author can be expected to give her best effort all the time, or should be cut some critical slack when writing occasional pieces, reviews, journalism, Tweets, etc.? Quite by accident, just before reading Soul at the White Heat, I came across another local library discard, a pretty much forgotten book by Anthony Burgess called Urgent Copy (1966), a collection of his journalism. In the introduction Burgess apologizes for the journalistic aspects of his pieces – too brief, written in haste and, admittedly, for money. No need to apologize, Mr. Burgess! The book was wonderful and I’d recommend it to anyone – a testament to mid-Twentieth Century literary culture at its (non-academic, non-theoretical, non-Twitter, non-blogging) best. In scope and approach – contemporary literary/social criticism - Burgess’s book is much like Oates’, but the overall composition, editing, style, critical insight and intellectual verve are all worlds beyond what Oates gives us here. So what happened in the past 50 years? Oates is old enough to know better, as she had already embarked on her enormous career by 1966 and had surely read Burgess's book. She should read it again. And slow down. And find an editor allergic to "quotation" marks.
August 26, 2019
Was not a fan of "Soul at the White Heat" as a book on writing. I enjoyed Stephen King's perspective much better, whereas Oats speaks more to literary criticism than on the craft of writing itself. This is also a needlessly long book for the content, and you'll find yourself hoping it will end about a quarter of the way through. 400 pages is simply far too long for a topic this dry.
May 15, 2017
Pedantic. The best thing about this book was the title. I know literary people and college professors love Oates, but I feel she is overrated. I've studied writing and everyone says to revise to make it leaner, take out unneeded words....but she seems to only add more unneeded words and it comes off as being pretentious. (Sorry, but that's my truth.)
February 26, 2018
Every notable writer of literary essays either aspires to, or ends up writing for The New York Review of Books, and Joyce Carol Oates is no exception. In this collection, her interests are ecumenical: from Emily Dickinson’s poetry and Louis Erdrich’ s Native Americans to H.P. Lovecraft’s shambling monstrosities and the short-story artistry of Ralph Ellison and John Updike.
The extended Lovecraft essay is worth the price of admission for anyone interested in horror or fantasy fiction — or familiar with Oates’s own fascination with gothic horror. Her most recent foray was The Accursed, whose atmospherics and portrayals of irreconcilable evil own much to Lovecraft and his Cthulhu mythos.
Many writer acknowledge Lovecraft’s influence without taking the stories themselves too seriously. Oates, by contrast, pays close attention to their artistry and limitations, along with an insightful and sympathetic commentary into the life a strange of often highly unlikable man.
She concludes with one of particular obsessions: boxing. The essay on Muhammad Ali is fine, but joins a groaning shelf on of other celebratory writings. The discussion of Mike Tyson, however, apparently based on at least one interview, is vastly more revealing. Oates explains how Tyson’s relationship with aging trainer Cus D’Amato made Tyson a champion — and then contributed to his downfall when D’Amato died and Tyson found himself alone in the crazed world of championship boxing.
Oates explores her own writing career without necessarily giving away any particular key to her staggering productivity. I’m reminded of a slender book by Michael Frayn, called The Trick of It, in which an academic marries the creative writer he has studied for his professional career. But he still can’t learn how she transmutes experience and imagination into story and fiction.
So, too, with Oates, who can lovingly describe his writing study and daily routine without revealing how she follows the Emily Dickinson admonition: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.”
The extended Lovecraft essay is worth the price of admission for anyone interested in horror or fantasy fiction — or familiar with Oates’s own fascination with gothic horror. Her most recent foray was The Accursed, whose atmospherics and portrayals of irreconcilable evil own much to Lovecraft and his Cthulhu mythos.
Many writer acknowledge Lovecraft’s influence without taking the stories themselves too seriously. Oates, by contrast, pays close attention to their artistry and limitations, along with an insightful and sympathetic commentary into the life a strange of often highly unlikable man.
She concludes with one of particular obsessions: boxing. The essay on Muhammad Ali is fine, but joins a groaning shelf on of other celebratory writings. The discussion of Mike Tyson, however, apparently based on at least one interview, is vastly more revealing. Oates explains how Tyson’s relationship with aging trainer Cus D’Amato made Tyson a champion — and then contributed to his downfall when D’Amato died and Tyson found himself alone in the crazed world of championship boxing.
Oates explores her own writing career without necessarily giving away any particular key to her staggering productivity. I’m reminded of a slender book by Michael Frayn, called The Trick of It, in which an academic marries the creative writer he has studied for his professional career. But he still can’t learn how she transmutes experience and imagination into story and fiction.
So, too, with Oates, who can lovingly describe his writing study and daily routine without revealing how she follows the Emily Dickinson admonition: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.”
October 21, 2016
Although I loved the title, and ate up this long book about writing and obsession and inspiration, I felt a little misled. There were moments were the focus was on the craft of writing and that unique thing that makes creatives tick and wane one way or the other. But the majority of the book were critical essays about not authors, but specific works. They were essentially long. poetic, and sometimes polemic book reviews. This is not to say I did not enjoy the book reviews, many discussing books and authors I have never heard of. One thing is clear, Miss Oates is prodigiously well-read. She alludes to dozens of books so casually as to make one think she reads ten titles a day. But I guess what else could you expect from a prolific writer who has been publishing nonstop for over 53 years? She would have to be extremely well-read to produce the beautiful oeuvre she's created thus far. Though I would change the subtitle of the book, the rest is magnificent and unpretentiously smart.
October 24, 2017
Essays mostly about the writing life. An odd assortment: reviews of books about writers' lives, bios, autobios, novels. And a few boxers thrown in. And San Quentin.
Enjoyed most the Classics sections - recent books about the usual writers.
I The Writing Life
II Classics
III Contemporaries
IV Real Life
Enjoyed most the Classics sections - recent books about the usual writers.
I The Writing Life
II Classics
III Contemporaries
IV Real Life
October 25, 2016
So great to read the product of a great mind when it's been fed so many other great works!
September 7, 2020
Back sometime in February of this year (2020) the Covid pandemic hit and everything shut down, including the public library systems. Since all of what I write about as “read” is from libraries (three in my urban area and a lot of interlibrary loans,) this was a huge cut off in my reading. If there can be any plus to this situation it was that I received a huge delivery (up to 50) of books and dvds days before the shutdown and that has tided me over during the spring and summer. We couldn’t even slot drop and return books we had read. Everything stopped.
With libraries just barely opening, I now have to order books (I’m still not sure in what capacity the interlibrary loan feature is functioning.) You return books to a slot in the wall. You cannot enter the building, and you pick up your “holds” at a table outside. To get to that stage, you have to receive acknowledgement through email that the book has arrived, make an online appointment, receive verification, then physically go over and pick up the book(s) which are usually inside a white bag. When you return books, now, they go into a quarantine period and they don’t take them off of your record for two or three weeks. Who knows how long it will be in our present or future.
I had written earlier that I was never a huge fan of Joyce Carol Oates. Gore Vidal, at his cattiest, said, “The three deadliest words in the English language are “Joyce Carol Oates.” While I was listing that book, I saw the title of this book and thought it might be about writing, as a skill to be developed, but instead it was a book of essays on a variety of things including authors, a specific book, a movie “The Boxer,” and other things of interest to the author. Oates broke the book down into sections: The Writing Life (my favorite,) Classics and Contemporaries. I particularly liked her essays on “The Writing Room,” “My Life in Middlemarch,” a visit with Doris Lessing (does anyone read Lessing anymore?) and the selected letters of Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz. Vidal was cruel. The woman does have talent. It’s just that we are on different paths that sometimes have twists and curls that lead us into one another.
With libraries just barely opening, I now have to order books (I’m still not sure in what capacity the interlibrary loan feature is functioning.) You return books to a slot in the wall. You cannot enter the building, and you pick up your “holds” at a table outside. To get to that stage, you have to receive acknowledgement through email that the book has arrived, make an online appointment, receive verification, then physically go over and pick up the book(s) which are usually inside a white bag. When you return books, now, they go into a quarantine period and they don’t take them off of your record for two or three weeks. Who knows how long it will be in our present or future.
I had written earlier that I was never a huge fan of Joyce Carol Oates. Gore Vidal, at his cattiest, said, “The three deadliest words in the English language are “Joyce Carol Oates.” While I was listing that book, I saw the title of this book and thought it might be about writing, as a skill to be developed, but instead it was a book of essays on a variety of things including authors, a specific book, a movie “The Boxer,” and other things of interest to the author. Oates broke the book down into sections: The Writing Life (my favorite,) Classics and Contemporaries. I particularly liked her essays on “The Writing Room,” “My Life in Middlemarch,” a visit with Doris Lessing (does anyone read Lessing anymore?) and the selected letters of Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz. Vidal was cruel. The woman does have talent. It’s just that we are on different paths that sometimes have twists and curls that lead us into one another.
June 9, 2017
I find myself somewhat ambivalent about this book, in part because it's misleadingly framed as a book that examines the writing process and the writing life, when actually it is mostly a collection of book reviews. Only the brief early chapters deal with Joyce Carol Oates' own approach to writing -- these are mostly taken from lectures she's given, so they are somewhat oddly organized, full of asides, tangents and parentheticals that at times make them difficult to follow. The book reviews themselves are fairly interesting, although many of them have that kind of vague, literary elitism that left me disenchanted with academia in the first place.
Probably my least favorite aspect of the book is its somewhat dated approach to feminism. In the final chapter, a story of Oates' visit to San Quentin prison (why is this included?), she states outright that any feminism which does not acknowledge that society must protect females from male aggression is merely naïve, foolish. In a setting that so clearly depicts how people, when treated violently, respond with violence, this seems like a bizarre conclusion to include. So much so, that it makes me wonder if she means for us to take her seriously... But if not, then why be coy about it? Is this just another literary conceit meant to somehow point us towards the harsh ambivalence of "real life" (in contrast to the "soft life," I guess?, of art, literature, intellectual endeavor)?
If so, not exactly a new or ground-breaking insight, just another reiteration of this false dualism that imagines rationality as what separates us (for better or worse) from our animal bodies.
To which I can only respond: meh.
Probably my least favorite aspect of the book is its somewhat dated approach to feminism. In the final chapter, a story of Oates' visit to San Quentin prison (why is this included?), she states outright that any feminism which does not acknowledge that society must protect females from male aggression is merely naïve, foolish. In a setting that so clearly depicts how people, when treated violently, respond with violence, this seems like a bizarre conclusion to include. So much so, that it makes me wonder if she means for us to take her seriously... But if not, then why be coy about it? Is this just another literary conceit meant to somehow point us towards the harsh ambivalence of "real life" (in contrast to the "soft life," I guess?, of art, literature, intellectual endeavor)?
If so, not exactly a new or ground-breaking insight, just another reiteration of this false dualism that imagines rationality as what separates us (for better or worse) from our animal bodies.
To which I can only respond: meh.
December 23, 2016
My favorite essay is JCO's wonderful review of Jerome Charyn's "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson." So glad it made this wonderful collection.
July 13, 2018
Good but not great. A few gems. I could do without all the essays on boxing.
November 28, 2020
Like listening to the Beatles' b-sides. No fillers here.
August 23, 2022
If you’ve never read anything by JCO don’t start here, unless you’re doing English or Western Literature 101 at Harvard or Stanford. JCO is both a writer AND a 'professor emerita', ok? So take this collection of essays for what it's worth, save your notes and stop whining.
April 28, 2017
Not quite what I was expecting. I mistakenly thought thered be much more focus on the act of writing, or at least, on the subject of what it means to be an author.
Still, an interesting collection of essays and reviews from a well-established, and highly esteemed writer.
Still, an interesting collection of essays and reviews from a well-established, and highly esteemed writer.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews