A recent profile of Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker sent me to our “O” shelves to look for her collection of short stories, The Wheel of Love. I loved reading this brilliant, moving collection.
Oates is the American Balzac: she dose not hesitate to delve into the muddier depths of American life, which makes for fascinating, if uncomfortable, reading. She is one of our most brilliant, eclectic writers, who, since the 1960s, has minutely examined class, sex, race, violence, academia, social issues, dysfunctional families, politics, post-industrial cities, and industrial pollution in her fiction.
Oates is perhaps our most versatile writer : she has written brilliant novels about Marilyn Monroe, Chappaquiddick, the Love Canal, fundamentalist religion, and abortion. But despite her broad perspective and pitch-perfect writing, she is underappreciated, perhaps because of her enormous output. One often hears this complaint: “Another book by Oates!” The critics’ annoyance may be rooted in sexism: women should not write as well as she does, as much as she does, nor should they explore the horror and violence beneath the bread-and-butter blandness peddled as the good life.
In her poignant collection, The Wheel of Love, she depicts characters who are adulterous, amnesiac, mad, dropouts, drug users, celebrities, academics, shoplifters, and alcoholics. Some of the stories are conventional, others are “experimental.” Characters see themselves as trapped or terrified, survive car accidents and lose their memory, worry about their shoplifting daughters or feel trapped in suburban Detroit.
Several of the stories are set in Detroit. In her superb epistolary story, “Unmailed, Unwritten Letters,” set in Detroit, an adulterous housewife composes letters that will never be sent to her parents, husband, lover, and his family.
She often uses the word “terrified.” In the shattered Detroit of the ‘60s, she has become obsessed with ownership and hidden relationships. In a letter to her parents, she wonders why they have moved to the Southwest. Does it have something to with the burden on her father of the huge house and the lawn? “Even with workers to help him it was terrifying, all that space, because he owned it. Maybe that was why he it terrified him, because he owned it.”
The narrator has had three miscarriages, and her infertility is a one reason for her infidelity to her husband. In a letter to her husband, she says that he is more competent and reliable than her weak, angry lover, a married professor, and she and her husband have “bumbled” along for years. Again she uses the word “terror.” “I am a woman trapped in love, in the terror of love.”
In a letter to the editor, she writes, “Anonymously and shyly I want to ask – why are white men so weak, so feeble?”
The narrator is a mad housewife, a feminist bursting with anger and emotion. But perhaps at the center of her terror is the crumbling city of Detroit, its race riots and political wrangles. She is appalled by the debris, blowing paper, and empty cans in the streets . She writes to her husband. “Three years you’ve been working for the Mayor, His Honor, dodging reporters downtown. Luncheons, sudden trips, press conferences, conferences with committees from angry parts of Detroit, all of Detroit angry, white and black, bustling, ominous…. Your people are rewriting history as fast as history happens.”
The narrator receives mail from her lover’s wife and daughter, but does not send replies. She gets lost in the airport parking lot, is annoyed by her lover’s vauguenesss about the effect of Vietnam on the presidential election when he appears on a TV program. She does not want to marry him, is burdened by the complexity of relationships, and yearns for freedom. Is she in love?
I also enjoyed the beautifully-written, conventional story, “In the Region of Ice.” Sister Irene, a nun in her thirties, is nervous about her new job teaching at a university, but proves to be an excellent professor. All is going well, until her class is disrupted by a brilliant, intense student who has been kicked out of the Ph.D. history program. He is so insightful and intellectual that Sister Irene is both thrilled and nervous, but, safe in her convent world, she knows she is not equipped to save this disturbed young man. . “She was only one person… Was she safe in this person, or was she trapped? She had only one identity.” The routine of the convent confines her, but perhaps she has unconsciously learned about her limits.
All of these stories are brilliant, and we understand why she has won so many O. Henry Prizes for them. If only her novels got the same acclaim. She won the National Book Award for them, but surely she should also have won the Pulitzer by now. And there has been talk for several years about the Nobel. Perhaps this will be the year.