Lovely, Dark, Deep

September 15, 2014
Oates's (Carthage) newest collection characteristically mines the depths of the female psyche to find darkness there. In particular, she deals with women who hide medical proceduresâincluding, presciently, abortionâfrom their loved ones ("Sex With Camel," "Distance," "âStephanos Is Dead'") and with women who struggle to assert themselves in relationships with their artistic, self-absorbed fathers ("Things Passed on the Way to Oblivion," "Patricide") and with lovers ("Mastiff," "A Book of Martyrs," "The Hunter," "The Disappearing"). Throughout, the lines that define these secrets and hidden desires captivatingly blur and dissolve. "The Jesters," about aging suburbanites who eavesdrop on their neighbors' seemingly picture-perfect life as it shatters, conjures both elements, and then ups the ante with a paranormal twist. A pair of longer storiesâthe title story, "Lovely, Dark, Deep," which is a fictional reimagining of a young poet's interview with Robert Frost in his twilight years, and "Patricide," a longer exploration of a stifling father-daughter bondâexpand on these themes. As the interloping fiancée of "Patricide" says of her deceased lover, the Phillip Rothâesque Roland Marks, "He knew women really wellâyou could say, the masochistic inner selves of women." We might well say the same of Oates, with the same complimentary awe.

September 1, 2014
What lurks in the woods is creepy and scary, but Oates ventures in deep and reports back in this collection of stories dealing with themes of mortality. The prolific Oates (Carthage, 2014, etc.) returns to short stories with this collection of 13 tales examining the reactions of humans confronting the final baby boomer frontier-death. Oates' characters-including an assortment of deteriorating "great men," isolated, lonely, middle-aged women, and couples on the downslide-encounter harbingers of their eventual fates with every canker sore, abortion, scab and biopsy. Elusive neighbors, living beyond an area of unexplored boundary woods, haunt the lives of aging suburbanites in "The Jesters" while a puzzled wife, in "The Disappearing," mulls over the significance of her husband's divestiture of his personal possessions. The enervating effects of a brush with death are examined from the points of view of a survivor, in "Mastiff," and, in a twist on 1950s teenage-car-crash ballads, a victim, in "Forked River Roadside Shrine, South Jersey." The collection's titular story delivers a skewering of Robert Frost in its unsympathetic riff on the facts of the poet's life as well as a testimonial to the role of the poet's craft as a hedge against mortality. The aging literary lion in "Patricide," Roland Marks, allows Oates another opportunity to poke at the myth of the "great man" of literature while providing clues as to which man of American letters may have annoyed Oates the most. As unsympathetic as many of Oates' mordant and quasi-anonymous characters may appear at first, en masse their fears and anxieties in the face of death and decline epitomize universal recognition of hard facts: We're all in this together, and nobody gets out alive.

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September 15, 2014
Oates, one of few writers who achieves excellence in both the novel and the short story, has more than two dozen story collections to her name and she continues to inject new, ambushing power into the form. Here she zooms in close to characters locked in strange and intense negotiations. In Sex with Camel, the uneasy banter between a hyper teenage boy and his elegant grandmother indicates a lifetime of tension and fear. Animals play key roles. In Mastiff, the nervous female narrator with a wild little laugh is hiking with a man she doesn't think she'll see again when they encounter a monstrous dog. A jobless Stanford graduate under pressure from his father in Betrayed becomes an intern at the bonobo exhibit in the San Diego Zoo and undergoes a disturbing transformation. Oates is at her caustically splendorous best in the title story, a brilliantly choreographed, diabolically brutal pas de deux between the aging poet Robert Frost and a seemingly timid graduate writing student with the Edgar Allan Poe name of Evangeline Fife. Oates' stories seethe and blaze.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)