A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
“Pushing things to extremes is Oates’ literary modus operandi, especially when it comes to the myriad betrayals of the mind and body. In her latest collection of macabre short stories, she extends the traditions of Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson in her own unique arias performed by characters assailed by mental illness and intent on destruction…. High-pitched, unnerving, and incisive.”
New York: Knopf, 2023
251 Pages
Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers.
A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother.” In the collection’s longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide.
In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.
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ReviewsKate Folk, New York Times, July 12, 2023
The collection’s centerpiece, “The Suicide,” is an unsparing portrait of an author named Harold Hofsteader, whom Oates has described in an interview as a fictionalized alter ego of David Foster Wallace. Hofsteader, who has bipolar disorder, agonizes over how suicide might shape his legacy. His ruminations are darkly funny — for instance, he considers using a jump rope before reading the same detail in a French mystery novel: “The final gesture of The Suicide’s life was not going to be plagiarized!
Publishers Weekly, May 15, 2023, page 102
Humanity in all its devilishness is on vibrant display in these short and potent flashes of life in bleak corners. Readers will be spellbound.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2023
Oates’ vicious incisiveness enacts a more brutal persecution than any of the cruelties the characters inflict upon each other—ultimately leaving little room for change in any direction other than the downward spiral. While this makes for a heady reading experience, it also creates a certain thinness to the collection as a whole that results in individual stories feeling like experiments with a theme rather than explorations of the unlikely, but still human, extremes to which the characters are forced. Boldly cruel and consummately styled, these tales never fail to provoke if not always to satisfy.
Donna Seaman, Booklist, June 1-15, 2023, pages 35-36
Pushing things to extremes is Oates’ literary modus operandi, especially when it comes to the myriad betrayals of the mind and body. In her latest collection of macabre short stories, she extends the traditions of Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson in her own unique arias performed by characters assailed by mental illness and intent on destruction…. High-pitched, unnerving, and incisive.
I'm a Reference Librarian at the University of San Francisco's Gleeson Library, and I run the Joyce Carol Oates web site, Celestial Timepiece.
Celestial Timepiece 