Volume 51, Number 11 · June 24, 2004
Heart of Darkness
By Caroline Fraser
The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art
by Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco, 158 pp., $21.95
Rape: A Love Story
by Joyce Carol Oates
Carroll and Graf, 154 pp., $16.00
I'll Take You There
by Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco, 290 pp., $13.95 (paper)
The Tattooed Girl
by Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco, 307 pp., $13.95 (paper)
I Am No One You Know
by Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco, 290 pp., $24.95
Joyce Carol Oates, author of some forty novels (nine written under an assumed name), twenty short story collections, six novellas, eight volumes of poetry, seven of plays, and nine of essays, may be our most prolific contemporary writer. She may also be our most critically confounding. Hosts of reviewers have thrown up their hands at her ever-expanding body of work and criticized her for writing too much, or revising too little, and for other actual or imagined literary infractions. Indeed, few writers in recent memory have inspired so many strident, often ad hominem attacks and denunciatory reviews, characterized by John Updike as 'some of the harshest scoldings ever administered to a major talent.' She has been parodied in The New Yorker, and, in Harper's in 1982, she was the subject of James Wolcott's disdain in an article entitled 'Stop Me Before I Write Again: Six Hundred More Pages by Joyce Carol Oates.' In an interview, Truman Capote once said, 'To me, she's the most loathsome creature in America.'
Review, 4745 words
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