Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates

Commenting on her output of more than 400 published stories, 30-plus novels and other writings, a hostile critic called Oates an ""inexhaustible word machine."" Johnson, however, evokes her as something more than a typist with a self-confessed ""blindness toward excess."" Despite Oates's melodramatic oeuvre and her unmelodramatic career, he reveals a life that is more than her works. He not only describes how Oates's hardscrabble upstate New York, violent Detroit and uppity Princeton are metamorphosed and mythologized in her fiction but also displays the humanizing if occasionally unflattering dimension of the writer labeled by John Updike the foremost ""woman of letters"" in America. Although admiring, Johnson sees in his subject a propensity to exploit unflatteringly people and situations from her life, and he explores the anorexic emaciation, chronic insomnia and attacks of tachycardia that have afflicted her. The author, an English professor at Kennesaw State College in Georgia, concludes that Princeton has been too comfortable, failing to furnish Oates in her middle years--she will be 60 in 1998--with conflict sufficient to power her abilities to their potential, beyond a ""Bosch-like American garden of hellish delights."" (Apr.)