The world of Joyce Carol Oates is a grim, unforgiving one, flecked through with a strange and compelling beauty. The thick-as-a-tombstone career summary, High Lonesome: Selected Stories 1966-2006, offers a vivid introduction to this dazzling talent.
Oates has a tremendous reputation in the literary world – winner of the National Book Award and PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction – but I have to bashfully admit I'd never read any of her fiction until now. As a reader coming to Oates completely new, I found High Lonesome an unforgettable read, ripe with her distinctive style. Nearly 700 pages of short stories sped by in a haze.
For novices, Oates' work carries some of the operatic scope of Flannery O'Connor or Patricia Highsmith – both also women writing diamond-sharp prose about unpredictable horror, lust and despair coming into the lives of everyday people. Just in the first 10 stories, we deal with molesters, murders, infidelity, rape, suicide and more.
You'd think that would be depressing, but Oates' gorgeous, painterly writing gives even the darkest of subjects a glimmer of beauty, her prose flowing smoothly but rarely showing off, sculpting figures and places with a few choice words. "Pop Olafsson was this fattish bald guy with a face like a wrinkled dish rag left in the sun to dry," she writes in the devastating title story, "High Lonesome," and you can see Pop's battered face, his hopeless slumping form. Her characters breathe and sweat, and rarely feel artificial.
High Lonesome is divided into a survey of Oates' stories over the past 40 years, split into sections by decades. It starts with some of the finest stories in the book, her most recent work, and then moves back to the 1960s and on forward. The earliest stories from the 1960s tend to be more overwrought, lacking the subtle elegance of her later writing, but High Lonesome shows the ripening of Oates' talent.
Article comments
1 - Sister Ray
I will look for this book at the library. I like her writing. I don't remember the name of it, but I especially liked her short story about the doctor's daughter who walks on the wild side in downtown Detroit. It was in our American Lit anthology in college.
2 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!