The Accursed: Which Cover is Best?

Joyce Carol Oates’s novel The Accursed has been published with two very different dust jacket illustrations. Ron Charles writes in the Washington Post that they provide “a surprising study in national tastes and publishers’ methods.”

“Oates says that she likes both dust jackets, though she had concerns about the British version. ‘I think that, initially, I’d been worried that the U.K. cover would seem too lewd, or too “horror”-genre,’ she wrote via email. ‘But I think it’s very striking and in its way quite beautiful. The U.S. jacket could be representative of a more traditional romance novel, though with a slight twist. Dust jackets are always something of an enigma to me,’ she says. ‘One can only imagine what the paperback cover might be….!’”

Read the full article, Joyce Carol Oates and the accursed tale of two dust jackets.

JCO’s Gothic Quintet Considered

Matthew Surridge, writing for Blackgate.com, consideres each book in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Gothic” series, in preparation for The Accursed, the final book of the series to be published.

Bellefleur: ”Published in 1980, Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Bellefleur is an astonishing gothic tour-de-force, a breathtaking and phantasmagoric book that whirls through generations of an aristocratic New England family. It deals in almost every kind of traditional horror-story trope: a sprawling, crumbling, haunted house; angered spirits of the land; men who take the shape of beasts; at least one innocent heiress who develops a peculiar case of anemia after being courted by a sinister European nobleman. All these things are folded into an overarching tale of greed, power, sex, and tragedy, told in a wild style that almost hides a precise structure of event, theme, and imagery.”

A Bloodsmoor Romance: “To some extent this may well be a function of my being not the right reader for this book. While Bellefleur consciously played with the genre conventions of the Gothic proper, Bloodsmoor uses and parodies the conventions of 19th-century romance — romance as we know it, the story of young women looking for love and marriage. And romance as such is not a form that has any intrinsic appeal to me, or whose appeal I understand. I don’t say it’s bad. I’m saying I have no idea what makes romances good or bad as romances.”

Mysteries of Winterthurn: “Winterthurn plays with the mystery novel as Bellefleur did the Gothic and Bloodsmoor did the romance. Like those books, it both celebrates and subverts its form, and presents a parable whose themes include America, gender, and God. Unlike those books, it also creates a fully-realised community, the city of Winterthurn, against which background its hero investigates three separate cases. I think it succeeds both as a story and as a work of well-wrought prose. It deftly manipulates symbol and theme, while in its pacing and manipulation of suspense, it might well be called genre-savvy; though not necessarily savvy in the genre one would expect.”

My Heart Laid Bare: “It may be worth noting that while My Heart Laid Bare was published in 1998, it was written in 1984. Similarly, The Accursed, under its original title The Crosswicks Horror, was first completed in 1981. Both books were revised in the years since, and I wonder if that might help account for the fact that My Heart Laid Bare has a rather different feel than the other ‘Gothic’ books. Nothing evidently supernatural happens in it. It’s only nominally Gothic in atmosphere, and the narration’s relatively straightforward — it’s told in omniscient third-person, unlike Bloodsmoor or Winterthurn, and is stylistically more restrained than Bellefleur (which admittedly is not saying much). Still, it’s a wild, wide-ranging look at American life in the early part of the twentieth century, incorporating several self-consciously melodramatic touches. It fits in with its predecessors nicely, and overall serves to round off Oates’s Gothic sequence as we’ve had it so far.”

Joyce Carol Oates and France

Anne Korkeakivi writes about American literary fiction finding an audience in France.

I asked Joyce Carol Oates about her avid French following. “For me,” she says, “the very sound of French spoken is musical, beautiful, subtly cadenced.” Her involvement with French language began in high school; as an adult she has taught and published French literature. “This is my background for writing, and my relationship with the French reading public may be related to it.” She also praises her translators.

Read the full article in The Millions.

Joyce Carol Oates on bringing Foxfire back to the big screen

Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, the film based on a book written in the 1990s about a small town in the 1950s, has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday night and its theme is more timely than ever, says its author, Joyce Carol Oates.

Rebellious Margaret “Legs” Sadowsky and her classmates Maddy, Lana, Rita and Goldie form the titular secret gang to revenge themselves against the men and boys of their 1950s small town.

“They were girls whom I knew — a composite of girls, not necessarily all in one group, some I went to school with,” Oates, 74, says in an interview from her home in Princeton, N.J., last week.

“I saw the first [version] years ago,” she says of the 1996 adaptation that starred a young Angelina Jolie as Legs, and moved the setting to a high school in present-day Portland. “The problem with the first film, as you probably noticed, was that it was so low-budget that they couldn’t do it in the proper time. And as a result it just was middle- and upper-middle-class suburban girls.”

The National Book Award winner is more optimistic this time around, though, as this film is adapted and directed by Palme d’Or-winning French filmmaker Laurent Cantet …

Read the complete interview at the National Post.

Joyce Carol Oates: By the Book

What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?

Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” which my grandmother gave me when I was 9 years old and very impressionable. These were surely the books that inspired me to write, and Alice is the protagonist with whom I’ve most identified over the years. Her motto is, like my own, “Curiouser and curiouser!”

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

Our great American tragic-epic, Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” This truly contains multitudes of meanings: the Pequod is the ship of state, the radiantly mad Captain Ahab a dangerous “leader,” the ethnically diverse crew our American citizenry. And to balance this all-male adventure, “The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.”

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I was trained to consider “disappointment” of this sort a character flaw of my own, a failure to comprehend, to appreciate what others have clearly appreciated. My first attempt at reading, for instance, D.H. Lawrence was a disappointment — I wasn’t old enough, or mature enough, quite yet; now, Lawrence is one of my favorite writers, whom I’ve taught in my university courses many times. Another initial disappointment was Walt Whitman, whom I’d also read too young (I know, it’s unbelievable, how could anyone admit to have been “disappointed” in Walt Whitman? Please don’t send contemptuous e-mails).

Read the full interview in the New York Times Book Review.

Joyce Carol Oates on Zadie Smith

Joyce Carol Oates reviews Zadie Smith’s NW in the New York Review of Books:

In its assiduously detailed evocation of the multicultural neighborhood of Willesden, in northwestern London, where in 1975 she was born and where she now lives for part of the year, Zadie Smith’s NW is a boldly Joycean appropriation, fortunately not so difficult of entry as its great model. In NW you will find what is called “stream-of-consciousness” prose (in which the reader is privy to the meandering thoughts of a white resident of Willesden, Leah Hanwell, who’d grown up there), snatches of overheard conversation (represented in reduced type), as well as prose-poems (“Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock…. Polish paper, Turkish paper, Arabic, Irish, French, Russian, Spanish, News of the World…. Here is the school where they stabbed the headmaster. Here is the Islamic Center of England opposite the Queen’s Arms”) and fragmentary, disjointed passages that read like notes for a novel, as well as the lengthy section “Host,” consisting of 185 numbered vignettes seemingly modeled after the “Aeolus” chapter of Ulysses, which is the novel’s heart, and involves its most engaging characters.

There are pleats in time, rearrangements of chronology, views of characters whom we’d believed we knew from sharply different perspectives. An aphorism shifts its tone from positive to sinister across hundreds of pages—the initial, seemingly visionary “I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me” becomes, in the cool summary of a young black girl’s “decline and fall,” the terse “I am the sole author”—that is, the sole author of one’s decline and fall.

The novel’s sketchily poetic opening, which seems to presage both hope and disaster, will be clarified, to a degree, near the end of the novel; the second chapter, taking us into the thoughts of Leah Hanwell, must be understood as preceding the opening chapter by several weeks, which isn’t evident at a first reading. Many of the novel’s passages don’t yield their meanings readily but contribute to its polyphonic density.

Complete review in the New York Review of Books

Is Dickens the greatest of English novelists?

Joyce Carol Oates reviews Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin in the New York Review of Books:

Is Dickens the greatest of English novelists? Few would contest that he is the most English of great English novelists, and that his most accomplished novels—Bleak House, Great Expectations, Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend, and David Copperfield—are works of surpassing genius, thrumming with energy, imagination, and something resembling white-hot inspiration; his gift for portraiture is arguably as great as Shakespeare’s, and his versatility as a prose stylist is dazzling …

Dickens is so brilliant a stylist, his vision of the world so idiosyncratic and yet so telling, that one might say that his subject is his unique rendering of his subject, in an echo of Mark Rothko’s statement, “The subject of the painting is the painting”—except of course, Dickens’s great subject was nothing so subjective or so exclusionary, but as much of the world as he could render. If Dickens’s prose fiction has “defects”—excesses of melodrama, sentimentality, contrived plots, and manufactured happy endings—these are the defects of his era, which for all his greatness Dickens had not the rebellious spirit to resist; he was at heart a crowd-pleaser, a theatrical entertainer, with no interest in subverting the conventions of the novel as his great successors D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf would have; nor did he contemplate the subtle and ironic counterminings of human relations in the way of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, who brought to the English novel an element of nuanced psychological realism not previously explored. Yet among English writers Dickens is, as he once called himself, part-jesting and part-serious, “the inimitable.”

Read the full article at the New York Review of Books.

The Crosswicks Horror: At Last

Admirers of Joyce Carol Oates’s brilliant Gothic novels ( Bellefleur; A Bloodsmoor Romance; Mysteries of Winterthurn; My Heart Laid Bare ) will be pleased to hear that the final book of this thematic series, known for years as “The Crosswicks Horror,” is currently being “revised / recast / rewritten.” The new title is “The Accursed.”

View early manuscript images of The Crosswicks Horror and other works here.

Update: 1/23/12: “Since I am immersing myself in the literature of 1905-6, & decades preceding, I will want to reread Edith Wharton, particularly The House Of Mirth; & Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; work by Willa Cather, Henry James, Jack London, & Upton Sinclair (The Jungle); plus romances & verse of the era, as well as looking at Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson with a “new”–(that is, a 1905-vision)–perspective.  (I am working on a gothic-historical novel set in Princeton, NJ.)”

From: Writers tell us what they plan to read in 2012.

 

Upon the Sweeping Flood at 45

Joyce Carol Oates’s second short story collection, Upon the Sweeping Flood & Other Stories, turns 45 this year, and it seems to have aged well.

1966: Millicent Bell in the New York Times noted that JCO had been compared with Faulkner; she continues, “I am also reminded of D.H. Lawrence, in whom an awareness, similar to Miss Oates’s, of complex and unnamed vitalities gives an electric force to his fictional scenes beyond anything even his own theories about life might have accounted for. And young as she is, near the beginning of what she may finally accomplish, Miss Oates is not unworthy of such comparisons.”

1994: Greg Johnson, literary critic and future biographer of JCO, published a study of the collection (Out of Eden: Oates’s Upon the Sweeping Flood) in Midwest Quarterly.

Dramatizing a modern world lacking structure and coherence but seething with vibrant, uncontrolled energies, this aptly-titled volume portrays a variety of individuals seeking moral significance in lives that are buffeted mercilessly by social, economic, and psychological forces that often seem beyond their control or understanding. Upon the Sweeping Flood examines the sterility of modern religious and academic institutions, the conflicted identity of women entrapped in limiting social roles and personal relationships, and the general inability of her characters, whether male or female, whether among an intellectual elite or the rural poor, to impose structure and control upon the sweeping flood of experience. Oates’s title, taken from the Edward Taylor poem appended as an epigraph to the collection, evokes an image expressing better than any other in her oeuvre the essential Oatesian vision of our human predicament. As Karl Keller has noted, “All of the stories in the collection are related in one way or another to the general theme of Taylor’s poem: the disparity between man’s desires and his deserts, and his inability to bridge the gap between himself and anything ultimate.” The title also recalls Oates’s intense reaction to first reading Nietzsche, at age eighteen: “what visceral unease!—as if the very floor were shifting beneath one’s feet.” Throughout this collection, Oates places her characters within a shifting, chaotic landscape tentatively poised at the edge of the Nietzschean abyss.

2011: Alan Heathcock, whose first story collection, Volt, places him at the beginning of a promising literary career, writes of inspiration he’s received from a master.

I own an old ragged paperback of the story collection Upon the Sweeping Flood. The pages are yellow and brittle. On the first page, before any of the stories, is a quote from Oates: “I am concerned with only one thing, the moral and social conditions of my generation.” Just like that. So easy, so focused. My problem is clear. I am distracted, focusing on many things, while her concern is distilled into a single sentence. And oh how she pays out that focus.

The first time I read the title story, I was sitting in a condo on the fifth floor of a building in Chicago, Illinois. I remember it was fall, probably October, and I put the book down, trembling a bit, and stared for a long time into the golden tops of the locust trees outside my window. I was a budding writer then, and remember reflecting on my own work and thinking something like, “You’re not even close. Not even in the ballpark yet…

Read the full essay at beatrice.com.

Heathcock has more to say on the subject on the Library of America blog:

While teaching at Boise State University, I had a macho ranch-raised kid declare he never read women writers because they only wrote meek stories about domestic life. To combat his ignorance, I gave him the story “Upon the Sweeping Flood” from the collection of the same name. The story—about a man who drives headlong into a hurricane only to become stuck in a farm-house with a teenage boy and girl—rages with the ferocity of a great storm and ends with possibly the most shocking violence I’ve ever read. It made the ranch-kid eat his hat (and words). Oates has written many great books, and this one, though not discussed as often as her award-winning novels, is, in my opinion, her best work, and deserves to be mentioned as one of the best collections of stories in the latter half of the twentieth century.

“My Sister, My Love” Wins Award

Joyce Carol Oates’s novel “My Sister, My Love” wins France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne “Madame Figaro.”