Running is the way Joyce Carol Oates aerates her imagination, one of the most fertile in America. An hour each day in fall, two hours in summer, she winds through the streets near her house outside Princeton, N.J., opening her mind for new seed.
It must work. Look what Oates is doing this fall:
In October she published a collection of 27 tales of the grotesque. Her article on a fictionalized male writer who mistreats women appears in the current issue of Playboy. On her desk is a proof of the novel she will publish in July. On her mind is an essay on Ernest Hemingway she has been invited to write for the Folio Society edition of his work. In the meantime, this American storyteller is at work on yet another novel. And, yes, she continues to explore new terrain: In September, she published a children's book, her first.
Take a month off, some critics have complained over the years. Can anybody who writes so much be taken seriously, say, considered for a Nobel Prize (though she was nominated once)?
Admirers, though, wonder whether Oates' critics aren't intimidated by her extraordinary level of achievement, the same sort of volume produced before her, Oates notes, by artists such as Picasso, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, Hemingway, Faulkner.
In the admirers' camp is one of the institutions that houses Oates' books, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, where tonight its trustees and benefactors will honor her for a lifetime of literary achievement. It is the Enoch Pratt Society's second such $10,000 award. The first went to novelist Saul Bellow last fall.
At 60, Oates is a haunting presence on the American literary landscape: novelist, playwright, distinguished master of the short story and poet, acclaimed for her mastery of the dark side of life and her gift for developing suspense and terror as a literary art form. Oh, and for the profound emotion she stirs within the souls of readers of her books and spectators of her plays.
"All of her work touches you very deeply emotionally," says Robert Hillman, a Baltimore lawyer who led the Enoch Pratt Society group that selected Oates for its second annual award.
She was 31 when her book "Them," a novel tracing the life of a poor black family before the 1967 race riots, won a National Book Award for fiction in 1970. Since publishing her first novel 34 years ago, Oates has written two major works a year, a record that has received almost equal amounts of praise and criticism.
Some say her most enduring novel may be "Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart," a 1991 work about the bond between a white woman and a black man who murders to protect her.
Oates herself is curious what readers will make of her next novel, "Broke Heart Blues," to be published next summer. They are likely to be surprised -- as she was, she says -- by how loving it is.
"It is the most cheerful of my novels much more benign than any," Oates said one late afternoon last week in a telephone interview. Set at a 30th high school reunion in a town based on Oates' own childhood home, a rural farming community in upstate New York, the novel is about nostalgia in America at the end of the 20th century. "A Valentine to American life in the 1960s and 1970s," Oates calls it. "It ends with the words, 'We Love You.'
"It would have been [a good] ending to my entire career," she says.
Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1987. She leads what she describes as an ordinary life with a husband and a cat and, each semester, about 25 students. She married Raymond J. Smith, a professor of 18th century English, 30 years ago.
On this windy, autumnal day, Oates has just returned from running. She sounds calm. But when she writes, a heart beats wildly inside this lean, sensitive woman, described by those who have met her as graceful and more beautiful than her pictures.
"I feel like lightning yearning to strike," she wrote in a 1995 letter. And strike she does.
It is not necessary that Oates give readers the ghastly details of a death or rape or murder; she creates her terror by positing the idea that ordinary things are not what they seem; that at any moment, we are all perilously close to falling into an abyss.
Her genre is realism, her subjects the conflicts of her generation, be they urban riots, affluent suburbanites or vulnerable women. "I am concerned with only one thing, the moral and social conditions of my generation," Oates once told a Chicago newspaper. To her, the reality of post-war America is more terrifying than any nightmare. Consider "Black Water," a 1992 novella inspired by the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident in which a young woman drowned in a car driven off a bridge by Sen. Edward Kennedy.
The entire story takes place in the mind of Oates' protagonist, Kelly, as she lies trapped underwater in a brown Toyota.
After just half a page, the reader is with her in the passenger seat, where she goes over the events of the day as black water splashes through the cracked windshield. Am I going to die? -- like this? Not now. Not like this. She was 28 years, eight months old too young to die thus too astonished, too disbelieving, to scream.
She goes back over the day, running on the beach, how excited she was to meet the Senator at the party, to tell him of her work for political causes. She was the girl, she was the one he'd chosen, she was the one to whom it would happen In her hand she held his shoe, the one she had grabbed onto as he clawed, clutched, scrambled and kicked to get out of the car. He was gone but would come back to save her I'm here.
"I am very interested in idealism," Oates says. "Kelly is a romantic and an idealist. It's basically something that has existed in different forms throughout the ages a young woman being attracted to a powerful man, and [in the end] he uses her."
"Black Water" the novella, and later an opera of the same name, were critically acclaimed. Unlike the novella, told from the interior view of the victim, the opera examines the tragedy externally. Oates wrote the libretto at the request of a composer. It was unusual to rewrite a piece, but not to see Oates dabble in a different form.
Her range means that readers often don't know what to expect.
"In my own imagination I don't know what is coming next, either," she says.
In every form she tackles, though, what Oates' does best is to "convey psychological states with unerring fidelity, and to relate the intense private experiences of her characters to the larger realities of American life," her biographer, Greg Johnson, writes in "The World of Joyce Carol Oates."
"What drives Miss Oates' fiction is her phobias: that is, her fear that normal life may suddenly turn monstrous," John Gardner, the late novelist and critic, wrote in the New York Times Book Review in 1980.
Oates agrees that her phobias show up in some work, such as her new literary horror stories, "The Collector of Hearts," or her 1980 "Bellefleur," a novel of Gothic style replete with monsters, vampires and evil people.
But novels like "We Were the Mulvaneys," the 1996 story about a family's life after the prom-night rape of a 17-year-old daughter, are completely realistic. In these there are no simply evil people, though there are people who behave badly, she says.
To criticism that her work often contains violence, Oates responds that only in the exploration of evil does one arrive at a moral sense. Cheery world views, she observed a decade ago, are appropriate only for television commercials.
Inevitably, readers wonder whether her own childhood was troubled, or if she herself was abused. But Oates says she grew up in a warm and loving family on a farm owned by her grandmother 25 miles north of Buffalo, N.Y.
Her childhood is indeed a source of inspiration, she says, but it was the world outside that beloved farmhouse that caused her terror. "We begin as children by imagining and fearing ghosts. By degrees, through our long lives, we come to be the very ghosts haunting the lost landscapes of our childhood," she wrote in an essay last year.
In it, she described the one-room schoolhouse where as a little girl she learned her love of reading and writing. Then, just when the reader warms up to the scene, Oates looks about the room and sees trouble: the grown boys and the aggressive girls in the working-class community who routinely harassed and pummeled the younger children.
A skinny, bookish kid, she grew up to see that her fear of the boys and girls who beat her up on the way home from school
was a universal experience.
As she gets older, Oates says, she thinks more and more of her childhood.
When she shuts her eyes, she envisions it more clearly than ever. Often in her dreams, she says, she sees the first room she had as a child.
Perhaps that is why she has written her first children's story, about a girl of 8 who loses her cat, then finds it again.
Joyce Carol Oates says she is slowing down. But maybe she is just working backward.
Oates on Oates
Joyce Carol Oates' range as an author is as wide as her audience at book signings. At a recent stop in San Francisco, she was autographing her 1993 novel "Foxfire, Confessions of a Girl Gang" for high school students; her 1996 novel about a family dealing with rape, "We Were the Mulvaneys," for women's reading groups; and copies of "On Boxing," a 1987 essay on the sport, for male readers.
Asked which books she would recommend to a reader unfamiliar with her work, Oates offered two she said are also her favorites:
"We Were the Mulvaneys," she said, is for those interested in "domestic realism." "Zombie," a "very odd, strange, kind of a cult novel" from 1995, explores the inner life of a serial killer.
"To me, 'Zombie' is a voice very different from myself," Oates says. "But 'We Were the Mulvaneys' is closer to my heart. It even has my cat."
Pub Date: 11/12/98