America’s pre-eminent “Woman of Letters”, Joyce Carol Oates, has published over 100 books in 40 years – three last year alone – and, after joining Twitter at 74, still finds time to tweet relentlessly. In a recent interview with The Telegraph, she describes the bizarre impulses that overtook her after the death of her husband, and her unlikely friendship with Mike Tyson.
“It’s incongruous to watch this tiny, wan woman get so worked up about Tyson,” Jessica Grose observes. But, as her tweets – “an outlet for my sense of disturbance and outrage” – show, Oates is not afraid of confrontation. And, as her most recent tweet proves, she also has a lighter side:
"I go until I am stopped. And I am never stopped." Percy Shelley; or, precursor of Justin Bieber.
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) January 23, 2014
Oates’ most recent work, Carthage, involves the disappearance of a dysfunctional 19-year-old girl, and the implication of a decorated Iraq war veteran. Oates has never shied away from disturbing subject matter. On the contrary, she seems to embrace it.
It’s not exactly surprising that underneath Oates’s unruffled, kind exterior there are roiling, dark thoughts. Her work contains what The New York Review of Books once described as “a kind of Grand Guignol of every imaginable form of physical, psychological and sexual violence: rape, incest, murder, molestation, cannibalism, torture and bestiality”.
Oates objects to the notion that there is anything unusual about covering such subjects in a literary matter – “In actual life, millions of people die cruel and heedless deaths, and there is no one to record their myriad, unique stories, but art singles out individuals for scrupulous attention,” she once said. However, she is probably the only person to have won a National Book Award and written a novella about a gang rape and its aftermath (Rape: A Love Story).
Book details
- Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates
EAN: 9780007485741
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Image courtesy Paris Review