Ha ha! I haven’t read it yet, but I wanted to say that surely, given the author’s career and stature, this is professionally overwritten, William!

My comment is meant to be read as tongue in cheek, William. I am no defender of JCO or her accolades, nor do I think what a writer has written before excuses any later failings (though it might provide context). This was just about the word amateur in one of its definitions, though I knew what you meant.

As for knowing what happens in the story, I’m excited to find out when I read it! You’ve certainly piqued my interest more than JCO’s street cred!

Due to no discussion here, I haven’t been here for a while. But after reading “Late Love”, I decided to visit, intending to comment on it under Oates’ previous story posted here. So I’m very pleased to see *this post and find discussions starting up again.

Welcome back, Trevor! (Please check your spam.)

“Late Love” grabbed and held me. Overwritten? Mmm… not so much. There’s something to be said for all the detail building up the tension, following the perceptions and thoughts of the wife—by third person narrator, but if omniscient we aren’t privileged to know. I suspected somewhere along the way that things weren’t necessarily as they seemed. But to answer the question of “what happened”, I’d say we know only what we’ve been told. Were there hints of more or other? Maybe… ambiguous. Is the narrator reliable? You tell me! See, it’s a *story!

I discovered JCO late, 30-some years ago, and over time I’ve read a rather random array of a couple dozen of her novels and story collections (more the latter), so I was a fan; but due to a few notable disappointments I eventually found her novels such a mixed bag that I became increasingly reluctant to risk rhem.

It’s been some years since I’ve read anything, other than her New Yorker stories since I first subscribed a few years ago. Probably the latest book I read was Wild Nights! , fictional versions of the “last days” of several classic authors. I liked that, except I felt she was over-cynical about Twain. I’m sure I’ve missed numerous gems, and have long intended to explore again.

Where to start? Hard for me to say. I never read some of her most acclaimed books (such as Them, and Blonde). I did read ..Mulvaneys, which was luke warm for me, although I recognize its merits and understand why it was popular. I suspect it will be one of her novels on the shorter list that is read past our lifetimes.

My first was A Bloodsmoor Romance, which I very much enjoyed. It’s a 19th Century family saga/romance satire. My highly literate and deeply moral mother didn’t know that when I began reading it to her during her bereavement upon becoming a widow. Not far into it, she raised doubts about wanting to continue, but I said let’s go on a bit longer. It was when we got into a certain “bedroom scene” that she suddenly started laughing her head off… and she was hooked.

The novel that most engaged me was What I Lived For. It’s been a long time, but I recall feeling it was meaningful, had substance. Who knows how I’d have responded now. But I liked it enough that I brought it to a potluck supper at Christmas time one year, where we had a gift giving game in which the person who will receive your gift is unknown and not your choice.

I prepared the book by thoroughly pasting the pages of the epilogue together so they could never be read. You see, the epilogue is a spoiler; and I don’t just mean a spoiler in the ordinary sense. I mean it spoils the story if you *ever read it! I explained this to the senior lady who got my gift, and she seemed baffled.

Look: Some of you may have watched the TV series “Lost” (one of the few drama shows that engaged me by that time, and almost the last TV I ever watched). And you may recall what the final episode did to the whole series…

Don’t read the epilogue. Tear it out and throw it away before you even start. Don’t turn a meaningful story into a made-for-TV movie. I’m so afraid that like the kid putting his fingers in the flame you’ll not heed what I say. I’m warning you! What more can I do?

On the other end of the spectrum, I needn’t have bothered with Black Water). The last of her novels I read was Middle Age: A Romance. It was all I could do to get through it and I remember nothing more about it.

I’ve read a few other novels, but mostly her short stories, about 15 of her 50 or so collections. Apart from what I’ve mentioned, that’s what I like best of her work. If you’re a short story enthusiast like me, maybe you ought to start with High Lonesome : New & Selected Stories, 1966-2006. I recall particularly liking a little volume of “short shorts” called Where Is Here? About 10 of her collections are in the realm of horror, suspense, etc. I read one, but I have very limited appetite for that sort of thing. Although our current story fits that category, doesn’t it?

If I ever get back to JCO novels, I may try another one in her series akin to Bloodsmoor (such as Bellefleur), and catch up on later ones that look good (such as The Gravedigger’s Daughter, or A Book of American Martyrs). But I’d like to hear from others what stood out for you.

And Senior: thanks for the recommendations, they sound good!

Glad to see some familiar faces here :-) ! I haven’t finished the story yet, so I haven’t read the comments carefully yet since I don’t want to know everything that happens in the story, but I am enjoying the story quite a bit so far (about halfway done, I think). I’m going to try to finish tonight!

And Eddie — I do now see your emails! I hope we get some more discussions going here as well! Thanks so much for your enthusiasm and support!

Eddie,
Thanks for your comment. Also thanks for all the more info on Joyce Carol Oates, her books and her short stories and what critics do in criticizing her because she has written so much and seem to withhold credit for how well written her books are, trying to short change her achievements whenever and wherever they can. The big boss where I work would tell her not to listen to any of them. He would also say, when a critic writes that an author’s excellent book is not that great, he or she is telling the whole world that he or she is incapable of writing such an excellent book that they need to so strenuously criticize. I have only read, “Babysitter” and “A Widow’s Story.” But they are both brilliant.

I would say that her memoir is stark but contains almost every thought or consideration a woman might have had her beloved husband suddenly died.

Spoiler Alert

As far as “Late Love,” she puts a horror spin on the tale, which puts it over the top or makes it a little more complex through a third person POV. If you read “A Widow’s Story,” it gives a more personal description of what could be the woman’s state of mind and her attempts to understand the man.

This story could be seen as playing with opposed or could be opposed polar opposites. Man versus Woman. Day versus Night. Confidence versus Uncertainty.

It could also be seen as playing with stereotypes. In the day everything is clear. At night everything is unclear. Woman are usually clear. Men are always unclear and indecisive. Woman are always unclear and indecisive. It can be sort of like Bach, counterpoint. Opposites bouncing off each other. Also some people interpret nightmares as uncertainty, unease with something or outright terror.

Be interesting when we see Trevor’s comments.

I think this is a great story. To me it is amazing that Oates can get my attention with what seems like a pretty straightforward domestic scene: a husband and wife, newly married, in bed, and the wife is tentative about how to help her husband awake from a bad dream. I was engaged and would have been fine even had the story stayed there, the wife getting increasingly fearful of the husband’s dream-state, even questioning the seemingly normal and lovely man whom she knew during the day. The day / night — reality (with all of the things we do to clean up and present a face) / existential dread (with all of the trappings of decay and body horror) dichotomy really worked for me.

Then for Oates to take us to the paranoia of Rebecca and the horror of Cronenberg . . . I just found the story always surprising, even while (to me) Oates stayed focused on the idea that the other is a mystery, and it can be hard to get one’s footing when the mystery comes to the surface.

I also love the ending, where it almost shows that this is a dance they are both participating in, neither knowing who is leading and who is following. Certainly we cannot be certain which was dreaming and whose nightmares are the most threatening to marital security.

I’d love to hear more from William about why the story felt overwritten. Because that was the first comment here and I responded to it before I had even read a word of the story, it was very much on my mind. I don’t think I was reading the story to defend JCO. I think (but who knows) that I was open to the critique and willing to agree, but I was carried along consistently and never felt that the writing got in the way or failed to keep me on track.

I was just able to catch up with the comments above. Thanks to all for the thoughts on the story (I agree that it is meant to be a bit of mystery for us as it is for the husband and wife — who is having the bad dreams? — and I think that uncertainty is part of the point she’s driving home). And thanks for the JCO recommendations and extended thoughts there. I have read very little of her work, and only short stories. There’s much to explore for sure!

The story was great up until the end. I was very disappointed. The injection of horror required horror in the end. It did not.

I’ve observed that JCO is commonly criticized for overwriting. I thought of that when reading the rest of her collection _Last Days_. I was initially too tired to have patience with the title story, and also later when reading the almost novella length “My Warszawa 1980”. I later read them upon waking in the morning, alert, with care and patience, thoroughly enjoyed both and found them brilliant.

I have the bad habit of looking at Kirkus reviews of books I read or may want to. Their review of _Last Days_ concludes:

“A few real stories, then, but mostly skippable Oates trivia.”

The “real” ones are almost certainly those in the first part of the book which I cited earlier as being in a styistic category with “Late Love”. The critic praised one of those, and then slammed the title story, as well as:

“… a number of travel stories—in which celebrity-writer Oates converts {and justifies?) her semi-official literary journeys to writers’ conferences and cultural congresses into a very thin, outrageously padded kind of fiction.”

Those would be the three stories following “Ich Bin Ein Berliner”, in which the POV of each was a different woman character attending such gatherings, the like of which I imagine JCO did attend. Certainly she would have learned a lot about what they and their attendees were like, and about certain foreign locations and their people. What exactly does the critic think is wrong with an author basing stories on knowledge and insight gained this way? And I seriously doubt the central characters or their actions were autobiographical, beyond being woman attendees. Or is *that “quasi”?

Was the fiction thin and padded? Two of the stories were pretty long, but I can hardly imagine what would better have been left out. The descriptions of the setting and people are a large part of the stories, as were conference discussions. Stripped of those, would the personal story lines have stood alone? Of course not, they were part of the whole, which is well assembled. Read “Old Budapest” and tell me it’s not a great story.

After the three “conference” stories, the last two stories in the collection are short, but represent two story types very different from any of the previous ones. I’ve described “Our Wall” in an earlier comment. “Lamb of Abyssalia” mystifies me. I need to read it again. But if someone here reads it, please come tell me what you make of it.

_Last Days_ is a great collection, diverse and excellent throughout. I might not ever have read it had “Late Love” not been discussed here. If you liked that, you’d probably like at least four of the stories in the first section. I hope some readers here will check it out. But don’t read it when you’re in a hurry, or about ready to fall asleep!

The book is available to read free at:

https://archive.org/details/lastdaysstories00oate/mode/1up

There does seem to be a major trend (not exactly new) to so-called “magical realism”, something short of what we’d call fantasy. To me, in concept, this ought to mean that there is something magical in the story (not in the metaphorical sense, but rather something or someone that is not possible in the “natural” sense), but that the characters, relationships, and story resemble real life. Am I getting this right?

Then there is basic pure realism, real life as we know it. I haven’t read enough or in any sort of balance to have no notion what percentage of fiction writing is or was realism, relative to the magical realism. But I know readers who don’t like anything unreaiistic, especially magical, in fiction. I love both and all, if it’s good, according to my sensibilities.

There’s this other category, in my mind, short of magical realism, which I like to call “implausible realism”. That would be anything that *could be real, could happen (whether physical reality, beings, relationships, or whatever), but is highly unlikely, even preposterous. It pushes the boundaries if realism, bu you’d need to make your own judgement about where pure realism begins and “implausible” begins—because “truth is stranger than fiction”, so someone said.

Maybe _Lord of the Flies_ fits the concept? Or maybe not…

T C Boyle is an author who commonly pushes that boundary. J C Oates often does, too—but she’s all over the place. Is “Late Love” plausible?

So to the subject of critics: I think many seem not to be able to separate their preferences in style or category from their judgement of what they review.

I think many judge writing against given models or their own preferences. They may denigrate something for not being realistc when that may not have been the author’s intent.

“This is a poor excuse for an apple. It’s not crunchy, and it isn’t even round.”

“That’s because it’s a pear. I like pears!”

Larry: For the record, in case there was any misunderstanding: I mentioned the new JCO story collection _Zero-Sum_, which I haven’t read. The one I reviewed was 40 years old, _Last Days_.

Also, for the record: Of course, I should have said “feint disparagement”, not “feint praise”, in a previous comment How to flub up a decent word play! Funny no one pointed that out to me.

Now I’m going to try to move on.

But Trevor: How do you do those gray quotation blocks?

Larry: True, it *could apply, as you say, to a reviewer’s praise, whether faint or feint or feigned. But my *intent was to address false or exaggerated *disparagement of Oates’ writing—thus my flub. At the same time, it’s *my ironic exaggeration, because it gives those reviewers more credit for recognizing her merits than I believe many of them actually deserve.

But although I express cynicism toward critics, I also recognize that there are valid contexts for criticsm. I do it a lot myself. Context is the key. That is to say, it may be a poor excuse for an apple if it’s wormy and actually an apple—unless it’s *intended to be a wormy apple. Sometimes we really don’t know what the writer’s intent really is. Sometimes (I think) it’s intentionally left for the reader to imagine. That may be the case with “Late Love” ?

Although I do want to move on, seeing the current New Yorker story is now up, I do have a bit more to add about JCO while we’re on her.

The list of books by, about, edited by, and including JCO is extensive on archive.org — And there are many videos.

https://archive.org/search?query=Joyce+carol+oates

A surprising number of her books are available free to read, without even registering. As I scroll down I find that even after the list seems to degenerate into items that are more remotely related to JCO, further on there are more of her books listed. One I noted is a novella I recall especially liking: _I Lock the Door Upon Myself_ . Another possibly good entry to her fiction.

Senior history fan: It’s hard to know just why I wasn’t as excited about _We Are the Mulvaney’s_ as you were. It was long ago, while I do recall thinking it well written and a possible classic. It may have been my reading mood, or what I had read just before… I hope no one was unduly influenced by my remarks. Your review makes me question my response and think mayhe I *ought to read it again. The trouble with that is that it’s exceedingly difficult for me to choose to reread any book, with the multitudes of unreads on my list!

So, _… Mulvaneys_ may be a good intro novel for readers who wouldn’t care for some of my choices. Besides, although I’ve read quite a few JCO books (mostly story collections), it’s a low % of her massive output, and my choices were rather happenstance—whatever just came out, or turned up in thrift stores or various sales—so I don’t even know what may be top of *my list were I to read even half of her books.

I’ve also enjoyed some big multiple author story anthologies which JCO edited. There’s _The Oxford Book of American Short Stories_ (1992). I think she did well choosing fine examples while (usually) not resorting to commonly anthologized ones. Then there’s _the eco anthology of contemporary american short fiction_ (yes, it’s all lower case). Fairly up to date, being 2008. Still working on that. Both are over 750 pages. She earlier co-edited a 1000+ page Heath anthology called _Story_ (1985) with Boyd Litzinger, which I haven’t tackled yet.

Finally: I see JCO as a phenomenon for her astonishing writing output, while also having a *life. My personal experience attempting much writing is that it became too demanding and all-consuming for me to have a life, too. I couldn’t stop, I often stayed up all night… Yet JCO can pour out the writing by simply devoting certain regular hours to that activity—so I’ve read.

Anyway, Oates is back on my list!