July 6 & 13, 2020 Issue

I always enjoy Leo Robson’s book reviews. His “The Art of the Unruly,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. It’s an assessment of Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel Night, Sleep, Death, The Stars. Robson says it’s “enormous and frequently brilliant.” He views it as an instance of what he calls Oates’s “counter-aesthetic” – her style of “rousing roughness.” He says,

Her dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them set in western New York, forgo an air of cool mastery in favor of a kind of cultivated vulnerability, an openness to engulfment. Human existence, in her handling, seems a primarily somatic enterprise, and her greedily adjectival prose can sometimes read like a sort of dramatized phenomenology. Even on a bustling city street, her characters can come across as frontierspeople, or toilers on a polar expedition. As she invokes a world of pounding hearts and thumping ears and watering mouths, she exhibits a refreshing freedom from embarrassment, an indifference to the concept of overkill.

I like that “greedily adjectival prose.” I wish Robson had provided an example of it. He also refers to Oates’s “sentences both snaking and staccato,” but, again, no examples. In one of his best lines, he describes Oates’s introduction of a character as “the syntactic equivalent of a four-car pileup,” and this time he follows up with a quotation to prove his point:

Just a glance at Thom McClaren, tall and rangy-limbed, sandy-haired, handsome face now just perceptibly beginning to thicken, in his late thirties—(Virgil often stared, when [he believed] Thom wasn’t aware of him)—you could see that Thom was one of those persons who feels very good about himself, and his self-estimate is (largely) shared by those who gaze upon him.

As Robson points out, the brackets are Oates's.

I confess I haven’t read any of Oates’s novels. But I devour her book reviews. They brim with artful quotation and illuminating commentary: see, for example, “In Rough Country” (The New York Review of Books, October 23, 2008) and “The Treasure of Comanche County” (The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005).

Robson says that among contemporary American fiction writers, Oates “possesses a strong claim to preëminence.” She’s also one of our best critics.