November 27, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rachel Aviv’s “Personal Statement,” a profile of writer Joyce Carol Oates. This piece differs from most New Yorker literary profiles. It has a clear, strong theme, captured in its tagline: “Joyce Carol Oates’s relentless search for self.” Okay, sign me up, I’ll read that. How we become who we are is, for me, one of life’s central mysteries. Aviv does an excellent job exploring it in this piece. It’s fascinating to read about an eighty-five-year-old writer, author of “sixty-three novels, forty-seven collections of short stories, and numerous plays, librettos, children’s novels, and books of poetry” and see how insecure she is about her own identity. Aviv writes,

Many authors grapple with a central preoccupation in the course of a career, until the mystery eventually loses its pull, but Oates, who has long been concerned with the question of personality and says she doubts whether she actually has one, has never exhausted her curiosity. There are only so many ways to dramatize the problem of being a self, one might think, but Oates keeps coming back to it, as if there is something she still needs to figure out.

I confess I haven’t read any of Oates’s fiction. But I devour her book reviews, a number of which have appeared in The New Yorker: see, for example, “Earthly Delights” (February 5, 2001); “Love Crazy” (March 3, 2003); “Rack and Ruin” (April 30, 2007); “The Death Factory” (September 29, 2014); and “Ocular Proof” (February 26, 2018). My favorite Oates reviews are “The Treasure of Comanche Country” (on Cormac McCarthy) and “In Rough Country” (on Annie Proulx), included in her great 2010 essay collection In Rough Country. Oates is an excellent critic – descriptive and analytical. If she’s insecure in her identity, I don’t detect it in her reviews. She appears completely self-assured.

Not that I’m questioning Aviv’s assessment. Her “quest for identity” theme threads her piece from beginning to end: “The persona was perhaps no more real than the ladylike role she inhabited at parties”; “Her short stories from the time, many of which revolve around romantic betrayals, are so precise about the impossibility of trying to cohere as a personality in the world”; “The work had piled up, giving form to aspects of her identity that she couldn’t otherwise see, but the process didn’t seem to have really changed her.” 

My favorite line in “Personal Statement” is “She seemed uniquely incurious when I read her lines from her journal.” That “uniquely incurious” made me smile. In Aviv’s piece, a savvy journalist-detective comes up against a foxy, guarded genius.