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Why would anyone want to do anything as absurd as reviewing a book of book reviews? Because, unlike the readily available volumes of fiction by Joyce Carol Oates, it is her book reviews and literary essays that allow the reader a conversational intimacy with the author herself. Here, the inner, hungry animal comes out. The sophomoric question posed to Oates more often than she'd care to mention --- What is your favorite book? --- is answered, in a markedly uncomfortable way, in this gripping collection of nearly 40 pieces from the pages of the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, and, of all things, the Detroit News.
With the essay or book review, you get the real Oates, as she, the anti-Hemingway herself, readily admits: "…in my nonfiction prose, it is always my 'own' voice that speaks. Often I'm excited by what I've read, and I want to talk about it with others…" So, until a tasty memoir comes along, avid readers of Oates --- especially writers wishing to know what makes such a prolific intellectual tick --- are treated to the lyric and objective observations in this collection. While the book contains essays on the personally grotesque and the dreadful of such popular and controversial subjects as Sylvia Plath, Richard Yates, Hemingway, E.L. Doctorow, William Trevor, Robert Lowell, and Don DeLillo, it is impossible not to immediately turn to the end of the book for Oates's powerful contemplation of peace, a relief from the monstrous and the tortured, "Pilgrimage to Walden Pond: 1962, 2003."
Oates generously shares the moments of revolutionary solitude that made her realize her own important destiny in letters: "Reading Henry David Thoreau's WALDEN, that unique and so very American compendium of wit, common sense, a young man's erudition and rhapsodic poetry, when I was fifteen years old in a farming community … was perhaps the most dramatic reading experience of my life. …In early adolescence we're primed for life altering experiences, and Henry David Thoreau was mine." She journeys to this magical place outside Concord, Massachusetts, years later to find inspiration and to, remarkably, find the woods and the pond unchanged --- no vicious invasion of Wal-Mart, McDonald's, or Target, thanks to the tireless efforts of preservationists. At this literary and philosophical holy place, Oates writes: "…we are provoked to consider what relationship we can have with another person, if we haven't the right relationship with humanity; and what relationship with humanity can we have if we haven't the right relationship with the world that contains humanity. These questions deepen with time." From that peaceful contemplation comes the understanding that just outside those woods, the fiend of America, of humanity, is waiting, one eye open to the dawn.
Oates has long been fascinated by the violence of the grotesques in life and literature, those twisted creatures that are the result of broken dreams and broken bodies, the leftovers that the ignorant lusts of life leave after the blind feast of fear, anger, and despair. Poignant then that Oates opens the collection with the suicidal Plath and ends with the silent Salinger. It seems there is no hope from the start in the relationships of artists like Plath to her husband, poet Ted Hughes, as the lovers tear each other apart: "…and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband [sic] off … And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek … blood was running down his face…"
From this brilliant love scene from THE UNABRIDGED JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH, Oates transports us to the memoir TRUTH & BEAUTY by Ann Patchett, in which the author describes her near lesbian, wholly infantile and repulsive relationship to tortured memoirist Lucy Grealy. What would seem drunken passion between two college age roomies --- "In a second she was in my arms, leaping into me, her arms locked around my neck, her legs wrapped around my waist…" --- becomes horrifying considering Grealy's disfiguring face cancer that makes her resemble a dying boy in a Medieval Bosch.
From physical and mental inversions, Oates propels the collection to the worst kind of perversion, the betrayal of writing itself by greed and by censorship when faced with an exposure of love. In "Private Writings, Public Betrayals," Oates discusses her initial desire to "protest" Hawthorne's destruction of his wife's letters.
The event, for Oates, leads to a discussion of the sale of Salinger's letters, penned to a young lover. It is here, in the chatty few pages that make up "Private Writings, Public Betrayals" that Oates reveals herself as the victim of just such a sale by a hostile opportunist, and where she, when set in such a personal situation, appears to advocate censorship of such private writings. And here questions abound. Is it really possible for a well-known author to have private writings? What is writing, if not something that begs to be shared, to reveal, to further the understanding of the writer and the reader, to further the progress of literary civilization? What if a writer destroyed all they had written --- could they still be a writer? Or a destroyer?
Confronted with the perceived need for self-censorship, writers from Hawthorne to Cheever, and from Salinger to Oates, have said yes and the courts have agreed. The title of this collection, then, becomes all the more important.
Yet, whether physical or metaphysical, these are gnarly badges of honor, these people are living, walking, splattering Pollocks in a mental and physical beauty-obsessed culture --- angry visages screaming "Boo" in the face of white bread conceit and invasion. In the rich and riveting context of the Oates-as-critic rhythm, the heroic American boxer Muhammad Ali remains mythic as does tough man Hemingway, Fitzgerald fan Richard Yates, and Irish icon James Joyce, living today through the fiction of William Trevor. Each man has a sickness that is dear to the heart, hidden behind the myth, beneath the fishing boat, inside the gin bottle, within the story of the everyday, while each woman beats the grotesque from her breast, wears the monster just beneath her face.
--- Reviewed by Brandon M. Stickney
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