The Heart of Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is probably more prolific than any prominent author in America. Not since Isaac Asimov has anyone written as much or as often, albeit Asimov’s resume included non-fiction in areas where he demonstrated no special authority and fiction mostly in the science-fiction genre, pounded out with interesting ideas but little literary polish.

As a Pulitzer contender, Oates’ writing is well and carefully wrought. Her roots are in Dostoyevsky, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and William Faulkner. If she read pulp fiction it was on the sly, except maybe for H.P. Lovecraft, whose critical reappraisal she supported by collecting and introducing an anthology of his stories of cosmic dread. Some critics seem wary of her productivity, probably a sign that those critics are pulling their own ideas from dry wells.

Oates occupies a comfortable position in mainstream literary fiction, both as novelist and short story writer, but has occasionally ventured into genres such as historical and horror fiction. Her new story collection, Give Me Your Heart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), isn’t horror as usually defined nowadays, but explores the shadow side of familiar domestic settings. The ghosts that roam her pages are the unresolved issues of the past, whether a nightmarish (false?) childhood memory, the effect of a father’s imprisonment on the family left behind or a man’s cancerous obsession with his wife’s first husband. Violence and vengeance haunt the collection, much of it the disturbingly irrational acts of individuals unable to rise above their circumstances. With their strange, compactly expressed compulsions, many of the tales in Give Me Your Heart are heirs to the legacy of Edgar Alan Poe.