Joyce Carol Oates at Brooklyn Book Festival | editrrix / CC BY-SA 2.0
One of the challenges for a reviewer looking to write about Joyce Carol Oates’s most recent books is the context of her larger body of work, which is so huge that a mere mention of it can eclipse the new release. The two titles released this year join more than 60 novels (under three pen names), plus volumes of essays, poetry, stories, a memoir about widowhood, a collection of diaries, and scores of edited anthologies.
The new novel, Butcher (Knopf), is gothic horror, and comes two months on the heels of Letters to a Biographer (Akashic), a collection of letters written to, and edited by, Greg Johnson—whose biography of Oates, Invisible Writer, was published in 1998.
On Oates’s letters: they’re brief, they’re polite, they answer Johnson’s questions about her work and childhood. She tips him off about her father’s poor health (Johnson interviewed her parents for the biography); she’ll mention, in the same tone as anything else, that she’s collaborating with Martin Scorsese on a screenplay, and also writing for the stage, and working on a novel, and publishing a short story, and editing a magazine with her then husband Raymond Smith. In one letter, talking about her archive at Syracuse University, Oates casually mentions her several unpublished novels.
The letters grant a look at Oates’s daily life over the past half century and should put to rest any question of how she writes all those books: she just does it. The work ethic is only visible between the lines, since she never seems to characterize the writing as work, and Johnson doesn’t do much contextualizing.
The collection’s charms are simple. Is it interesting? Not really. Is it engrossing? Weirdly, yes. If it feels a little too quotidian in the beginning, remember that these are not all the letters Oates has sent. Johnson knows Oates as both a friend and a subject of his scholarship of 50 years; he’s chosen these letters not for their narrative quality (there’s none) but for what they illustrate. Wisely, he’s omitted his own half of the exchange; the book is all Oates’s voice—except it’s a different register than usual. Oates is a constant reviser in her writing for publication; In the letters, as in Johnson’s magnificent collection Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, we’re offered a sampling of relatively unrevised prose—Oates’s curiosity is here, as are her intelligence and the eloquence, but the sentences are uncharacteristically short. Where her other writing often pauses time in order to observe a moment from different angles, the letters move quickly along—a task in the middle of the day, caught halfway between the chore ahead and the chore behind.
There must be something special about the voice because the quotidian doesn’t stop. She talks about her chores and her cats, meals and car stuff. There’s a Norman Rockwell–type neighborliness that seems false at times, until we see her sustain it, in different contexts, for nearly half a century.
Even when her hair’s down and she’s indulging in the nose candy of literary gossip, Oates just seems pleasant—neither her reference to Philip Roth’s caddishness, nor Cormac McCarthy’s alleged difficulty with editors, is a condemnation. In fact, she sounds like she’s riding in the front seat of a car, describing things on the sidewalk, not really concerned if anyone’s listening. Where that stroll-through-the-garden tone starts to sound like it’s maybe concealing something is when Oates writes about her former student, Richard Wishnetsky, who murdered his family’s rabbi, and then shot himself, in front of the Shabbat congregation.
Oates’s comment on the murder-suicide is this: “Strange to think how we are all, fundamentally, phenomena of ‘biochemical’ balance, or imbalance … Hard then to be ‘proud’ of one’s well-being and/or talent.”
Writing for the New Yorker in 2023, Rachel Aviv secured permission to read the 4,000 typed single-spaced pages of Oates’s journal, stored at the Syracuse University archive. Aviv marvels:
Perhaps no other writer in the past century has been so focussed on the products of her own imagination. Many authors grapple with a central preoccupation in the course of a career, until the mystery eventually loses its pull, but Oates, who has long been concerned with the question of personality and says she doubts whether she actually has one, has never exhausted her curiosity.
Aviv also reads an accompanying trove of correspondence. She interviews Oates’s friends and colleagues. Her profile’s overarching impression of Oates is as someone with an enormous “capacity to compartmentalize emotional pain.” At one point, describing a scene of Oates’s life from the early 1970s, when the author was recovering from a bout with depression, Aviv writes: “When she was cooking spinach and the water boiled over, she smiled and thought, How interesting, this scene of a woman mopping up green water.”
Oates’s letters to her biographer, uniformly brief and exact, addressing concrete things (almost no riffing), nonetheless capture Oates’s elusiveness: “I have paused the chores of my daily life so I could write you this letter; this letter is one of the chores.”
Perhaps the only thing able to match the cool reserve of Oates’s letters are the naked displays of emotions found in her fiction.
The bloodletting in her novels, the more naked displays of emotion, might give the impression of a less compartmentalized author, someone exploring her interests as she pleases, but a closer look shows such a caution in Oates’s constructions—establishing, for instance, a narrator with enough complexes that we don’t know which insecurity they might be protecting. It’s as if she’s building a succession of screens between herself, the work, and the reader. Not only are the narrator’s beliefs not my own, the writer seems to tell us, there’s reason to believe the narrator is lying.
The author doesn’t just depict violence, she seems interested in violence, particularly the aftermath or buildup to a crime. It’s as though the violent act were a statement, maybe even a text, to be deconstructed.
Her new novel, Butcher, is another type of epistolary work, presented as the (abridged) diary of Silas Aloysius Weir, a nineteenth-century “gyno-psychiatrist,” whose daily job, overseeing the patients in a women’s mental institution, is violence. The victims are violated, debased, and drugged into dribbling pliancy so their bodies can be experimented on—“treated”—for ailments that either don’t exist, or aren’t manifest. One of the narrator’s “patients” treated for the catch-all ailment of hysteria is strapped to a chair and forced to eat enormous amounts of food until finally, her muscles atrophying as fat accumulates, she asphyxiates. At least that’s what it looks like. Our doctor-narrator is more interested in torture than diagnostics. The book’s black cover is illustrated with a bloody scalpel.
Butcher is an out-and-out horror novel, and Oates is clearly enjoying the trappings of genre. Yet the book’s horror is only partly gore for gore’s sake. As in her fiction at large, in which certain story elements regularly recur—joggers, academic settings, cerebral and slight-framed women with morbid fascinations, and, as in this novel, violence—familiar tropes don’t feel redundant, as they might in another author’s toolkit, because Oates uses the novel as a grounds for exploring the inner lives of others, rather than revealing her own.
When she writes about Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, for instance, she isn’t using a historical figure as a vehicle for exploring her own preoccupations in the way her longtime friend and pen pal John Updike might (a familiar cycle of faith, family, and sex, in his case). Oates is writing toward her subject, Monroe, trying to understand her.
In Butcher, her anti-hero doesn’t just have terrible ideas; Oates shows how he reasons and contorts himself to those thoughts. The doctor muses:
I was in a position to speculate that sensitivity to pain, like sensitivity to any discomfort or injustice, has much to do with the social standing of the patient: The more impoverished … the hardier they were, not feeling pain as more educated & affluent persons do. It was not a matter of sex, primarily—a muscled brute of a woman would be less vulnerable to pain than a gentleman of a higher class.
Nor does Oates do anything to convey her own authorial scorn for Weir’s work (in fact, she gives us a preface from a fictional editor who’s trying to resuscitate the doctor’s reputation). We hear his attitudes about race, gender, and class, and observe the pomposity and condescension of his manner. What we don’t know is whether he actually believes these things, or if it’s all a convoluted justification for torturing the voiceless—the disenfranchised people whose voices aren’t heard and whose disappearance might go unnoticed by authorities.
The novel is brutally violent, and comfortably situated in some of its schlock-novel roots, but it’s also a remarkable work of literature. In terms of style, story, and subtext, it both invites a serious literary appraisal and, with such repellant subject matter, pushes that kind of scrutiny away.
It’s a strange push-and-pull. A strong novel from a mysterious author.
The sort who could write you a friendly letter every week for 40 years, and hardly reveal a thing.
