Joyce Carol Oates – author with amazing insight into human frailty

Date Published: {J}

by Bernie Ní Fhlatharta

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prolific writers in the United States and is one of the featured guests at this year’s Cúirt Festival.

She has written fifty novels but when Oprah Winfrey picked her 1996 novel, We Were the Mulvaneys for her bookclub, Oates became a household name all over the Western world.

It may or may not have been Oprah’s influence that led me to the book but I do remember I bought it in Charlie Byrnes Bookshop.

It was a bulky tome with a soft focus photograph of a rural homestead with barns and outhouses on the cover. It was instantly appealing as I was going through a phase of reading American modern literature.

We Were the Mulvaneys is the story of an ordinary family whose good life is destroyed by a tragic incident involving the daughter. Their world unravels slowly and sadly in this completely enthralling story.

This is one of those books that stays with you for a long time. The characters were so real, they could have been a family we all know, anywhere.

Though none of the other novels by her that I read left the same impression, all her work can be classified as modern literature. Although it has garnered her many prizes, it is a mystery why she hasn’t received the acclaimed Pulitizer Prize by now, or the Nobel Prize for Literature, which many critics believe she should get.

The latest book by her (her 57th) in Irish shops is Little Bird of Heaven and is another study of a family devastated by another type of tragedy. Again, the characters are so richly drawn that you feel you know them well by the end of the book.

It is set in Sparta, a mythical town in New York and the story is told in two halves by the two teenage characters. The author’s insight into human frailty is her specialty.

The pace is slow and the detail is incredible but well worth the read as the tragedy of an injustice unfolds. It is a very good read and evidence that Oates is still at her peak.

At 71, Oates still travels the world to attend literature festivals and readings and her soft voice and small stature is at odds with her strong subject choices.

Basically, she writes about family everyday struggles, human weaknesses and lost love. Miseries in other words, which should make her even more popular in Ireland!

Joyce Carol Oates has taught in the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she met and married a fellow graduate, Raymond J Smith, who became a professor of 18th century literature. In the seventies they founded The Ontario Review, a literary magazine and the following decade developed an independent publishing house of the same name. He died two years ago and last year Ms Oates remarried.

She published her first novel at 26 and has devoted her life to the written word since, for which she has won almost every literature award in the US.

She has also written novellas and short stories as well as several children’s books and has used the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly for her thrillers.

She doesn’t do telephone interviews so there was no opportunity to speak with her before she gives her reading in the Town Hall Theatre on Saturday at 1pm on April 24 with fellow writer James Lasdun. But it should be a treat, and anyone who hasn’t yet read a Joyce Carol Oates book is also in for a treat – 57 of them actually.