My first exposure was a book about a family who ate and ate. The food was described so nicely and the family stuffed themselves to their and my delight. It was in a sack of books we got from somebody around the time that I finished high school. And there was a short story called "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" that I read in a college short story class. Once I read both of them, I was hooked. Separately I really enjoyed them, and then I realized they were written by the same author. From that day, I've been interested in all of her work. Someday I might try to determine if I've read all of the novels. I think I've probably missed one.
Of course by the time I finish writing this post, Joyce Carol Oates may have published another novel.
When I saw The Accursed I was happy. It's a big book. And I prefer getting into a novel and staying there rather than going through a story quickly. Sometimes I read slowly but for this one, I didn't have to. It ends in all caps. Remember how people say that an email with all caps is like shouting? Well, sometimes I thought the author was deciding how far she could go without the reader throwing in the towel. And sometimes I thought parts of the book were brilliant.
Joyce Carol Oates is my favorite living author. I like Thomas Hardy and Edith Wharton at the moment, and together they are my top three. Today I finished a book of four novellas by Joyce Carol Oates entitled Evil Eye. It was certainly easier to read than The Accursed, which has footnotes, and letters from Woodrow Wilson and diary entries and those all caps. I have to confess that I really didn't think all caps was that rude or worthy of note until I read the whole section of them at the ending of this book. I'm not a fan.
But I never think that she doesn't know what she's doing, even when I think that I don't know what she's doing.
I like the quote from the young man who has trouble with letters who says on p. 466, "But why does it matter if words are spelled correctly, and used correctly, if they are lies? No one can explain."
When I'm typing, I think about putting two spaces in between each sentence, and notice when that is done and when that is not. I notice how Thomas Hardy uses to-day instead of today. I notice incomplete sentences; and vacillate about their acceptability. I notice capitalization, and I don't like it when I am inconsistent. And I notice spelling errors in almost everything I read that has been written since the 1970s. It seems once spellcheck was common, publishers stopped paying people to look for errors; and don't bother to use spellcheck consistently.
In the beginning was The Word, or the Word, after all. It's been with us the whole time. But what was there? Certainly not English; much less a form that I'm comfortable with. Isn't the truth the idea, and not the expression? Her words ring true to me. I once wondered dreamily how someone I had known was doing these days, to realize I was thinking of a character from one of her books. I was thinking about a character as a real person with a future and not as someone created with words. Too often, I'm asking myself why an author has written something; but with hers I ask myself why the character did that or the other rather than what I was expecting them to do.
The book opens and closes with maps. And that's a good sign for me.
When she wins a Pulitzer, will she stop writing so often? I hope not. I love knowing that I can find a book that I know I will be interested in, just because of the author.
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