“The Frenzy”
by Joyce Carol Oates
from the March 24, 2025 issue of The New Yorker
Publishing stories, poems, and criticism in the magazine for decades, Joyce Carol Oates is still going strong at 86. I haven’t read it yet, but from what I’m gathering from the interview, this feels very much like an Oates story, examining the power dynamics and horror as a much older married man takes a ride down the Jersey Shore with a young woman named Cassidy. Here is how it begins:
Early afternoon, driving south on the Garden State Parkway with the girl beside him. Passing exits for Point Pleasant, New Jersey, for Toms River. Something haphazard in his driving today, which is unlike him.
Wind from the Atlantic is rocking the Subaru Forester, and he feels a thrill of, what is it, a tug, like a tug-of-war, invisible hands on the wheel, which is his wheel, so his reaction is to resist the intrusion, the way he resists the subterranean pull of sleep when he wakes before dawn, stunned and exhausted by dreams.
Cassidy is feeling reckless. Young.
I look forward to your thoughts! Please feel free to share them below!
In this male menopausal tale, Joyce Carol Oates is extremely adept at revealing how testosteronic masculine disfunction is used to justify exploiting flawed similar younger feminine extra relationship relationships difficulty.
This is a very sad story of two people who learn they can only manipulate each other to a certain degree before arrogance and glandular greed trip them up into having confront what otherwise probably never would have happened.
I admire the extreme authenticity of this piece and yet it seems a little too predictable. It is a perfect short story and reminds me of Philip Roth’s novella “Goodbye Columbus” that also probably originates from the same very upscale New Jersey suburban town.
It is a very detailed emotionally effective portrait of a middle-aged man and a young girl’s failure to advert a cumulative arrival at mutual disaster.
It is like observing a mutually manipulative relationship culminate in an emotional train wreck. The predictability of this situation borders on cliche in that everything is a little to obvious for the situation.
I wanted to see more about how they got there. Most of the best novels have more tension in them if you see more of how the protagonists got there than just a precise description of state of mind they were in that virtually predicts what will happen.
There’s always a larger reading audience for an emotional train wreck than there is for how the two protagonists backstory predisposed them to the grand slow motion resulting in their march towards deathly emotional oblivion. Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth’s writing seems similar in that way.
Their writing is extremely precise, well-focused and dazzling but sometimes I wonder about what they might have left unsaid or unwritten; that there could be more.
Although there is much to admire and appreciate in this short story.
I appreciate the close analysis by Larry, especially as it’s a bit more dispassionate than my rather startled response to this.
It’s clearly a well-conceived story by a fine writer, but I couldn’t get beyond my skin-crawling as we listen to the endless line of seemingly introspective nonsense from Cassidy. He’s human certainly and not exactly a villain, but jeez–he’s not just sleeping with the daughter of family friends but is aware she’s a drug addict and 19 years old.
The ending is ironically fitting–he’s ruined her phones, used a certain amount of economic dominance over her and now he’s left literally naked with not a possession remaining in their room except a decrepit doll from the beach. The final twist is cruel and funny.
Partly, though, I wonder. Why create loathsome characters and then punish them after you’ve made them loathsome? Maybe I dislike Cassidy more than others.
I wish more people wrote in here these days as I’d love to hear other opinions.
The ending is exactly what a drugged teenager would do. No surprise. The adult is always the culpable one, no matter about her behavior. It’s interesting that Oakes is still dealing with this sad topic
Isn’t Cassidy the male’s name and Brianna the youth girl’s name??