Dear Husband,: Stories
by Joyce Carol Oates
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joyce Carol OatesEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2009-04-01
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Ecco
Book Reviews of Dear Husband,: Stories
Book Review: Simply: No.
Summary: 2 Stars
Joyce Carol Oates is considered a classic contemporary writer. And she boasts it too. She says she's a "serious" writer. And she obviously makes efforts to invoke an American timelessness in her work, as if naming specific cities might win her a prize or two, and perhaps it has.
However, perhaps Oates is just another name hyped up by publishers and this collection of short stories proves that she is. I guess I expected more from the author, but the stories were a mixture of sensationalism matched with horrible writing made of air quotes, excessive exclamation marks, and annoying run-ons. She tackles huge and sometimes taboo subjects--incest, pornography, divorce, patricide. Yet, the stories main focus seem to be just that without digging much deeper. For example, "Cutty Sark," a story about incest, is at best scattered. Oates starts with a contemplation of suicide, a character wondering if suicide is genetic in his family, yet somehow we end with the mother's incestuous affair with her brother. She draws her character in that story well enough, yet the incest taken out would have done nothing to the story, nor did adding it in do anything. That story in particular focused upon the relationship between mother and son, and the addition of the incest information adds absolutely nothing, and becomes just sensationalist.
Oates is a sensationalist. To say she is a realist is laughable. Her characters are not real, they overact and are not characters to whom we as human beings can relate. Not that rich authors and PhD drug addicts aren't relatable, but it seems like Oates is writing from a different generation and a different paradigm and is no longer for this time in literature: it was for, maybe, another time, in the past.
Despite, this however, there were highlights. "Landfill," for example, is a great story in which Oate's once horrific use of run-ons and air quotes profits into a haunting story about the murder of a college boy. Also, "The Blind Man's Sighted Daughters," is a story in which Oates skillfully shows the tensions between family members, in this case, two daughters and their blind father.
Other than these, however, themes are reworked throughout the collection in a way that is repetitive and bland, even with the sensationalistic events. Perhaps the "serious" writer is grasping for something from her ivory tower, yet if readers can't relate to her work, she loses an audience and runs the risk of looking pompous in interviews and boring in writing, something Oates does rather well.
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