In the Mme. Tussaud's of American literary writers, Joyce Carol Oates would occupy a niche by herself. Her name has become virtually synonymous with prolificacy, a charge denied by the author herself; (though she's produced nearly 100 books, she claims only steady work habits to account for her prodigious output). There's her chameleon-like ability to move between genres—novels, short stories, plays, essays, poetry, books for children. Her signature place settings are often a section of the country that conjures up bleak, gray days and frigid nights—the area of the snow belt and the Great Lakes. Readers have learned to expect that some of her fiction strays into gothic territory and that most of her characters are caught in the grip of an overwhelming obsession.
Oates may be an icon, but in person she's anything but a powerhouse. Slim as a pencil and dressed like a jaunty teenager in a red T-shirt, white cardigan, lime-green shorts and knee socks in a rambunctious floral pattern tucked into black sneakers, she welcomes PW into her rambling white contemporary tucked into a wooded glade in a suburb of Princeton. She is soft-spoken and somewhat reticent, but smoothly articulate about the source and methods of her creativity.
Her latest novel, The Falls, just out from HarperCollins/Ecco, returns to native turf—Buffalo and Niagara Falls (Oates was born nearby, in rural Lockport)—plays out a domestic drama catapulted into tragedy by the Love Canal scandal. Oates says she was not interested in writing a historical novel recapitulating the actual events that culminated in the class action lawsuit in 1982, which accused chemical companies and the city fathers of conspiring to cover up evidence of lethal pollution. Instead, she read only two books, cited in the book's acknowledgments, personal memoirs by Lois Marie Gibbs about her life in the fulcrum of Love Canal. Oates decided that one of the characters would be an idealistic lawyer who brings the first (fictional) class action case, and thereby destroys his reputation, his livelihood, his marriage and his life.
The novel contains some of her familiar themes: loneliness, longing, morbid possessiveness, jealousy and vengeance. Sexual passion fuels but fails to preserve a difficult marriage. Two of the characters suffer with obsessions, one foolishly, the other heroically. The menace of violence lurks beneath daily life, and then erupts, tragically. And the theme of Niagara Falls as a mystical, mythic force of nature runs throughout the narrative, influencing the characters' lives in specific, dramatic ways.
Oates says that she wanted to write a novel in which a father is redeemed after he's been estranged from his family. It would be a counterbalance to the character she created in We Were the Mulvaneys, in which the father is the alienating force, and the family could reunite only after his death. "I've often written novels that are two-tiered—father and mother and two children. I focus on one generation for a while and then young people come along and take over the novel. I feel that this is the story of evolution." Her original plot for Mulvaneys had the father going to prison, but eventually the narrative took a different trajectory and the redemptive occasion for her hero occurs posthumously.
For Oates, ideas are committed to the page only after they've played out in her mind for a long time. "These things are very strange because a writer can have a concept in her imagination for decades before you see a story that encompasses it," she says. It turns out that a long gestation is her modus vivendi. She likes to put away her completed manuscripts for at least a year before taking them out and revising them to a fare-thee-well. The Falls was actually written before The Tattooed Girl, published in 2003. As with everything she writes, the manuscript hibernated in one of the fireproof drawers that, conveniently, came with the house. "I almost never publish anything immediately," she says.
At the moment, for example, she is working on the short stories that came flooding into her mind as she revised a novel that she wrote last year. "I have so many ideas for short stories, I'll probably never get to write them all," she says. And she's added five pages this morning to another novel that will be published in the fall of 2005. Her editor, Ecco editorial director Dan Halpern, told her that one of the characters needed to talk more. "I always feel good when I can make the characters more complex, and I like to do it with a character talking about himself or herself."
Yet she feels that the dreaded label—prolific—is unjust. A recent article on writer's block on the New Yorker claimed that a prejudice exists against prolific authors, and cited Oates as a victim of this perception, observing that Oates "has had to answer rude questions about her rate of production." Oates thinks it all boils down to lifestyle and "different rhythms." She is bemused by some writer friends who don't work every day, who pause between books, who seem to lead carefree lives free of compulsion to write. "I work eight to ten hours a day to get a first draft." (She writes in longhand.) "Then I'll do a second draft [on the typewriter.] Then I'll put it away and work on something else." She teaches creative writing and literature two days a week at Princeton, too, and helps her husband, Raymond Joseph Smith, edit the articles for The Ontario Review. For Oates, multitasking means working all the time, but in a circular arc. Thus her vast oeuvre and her conviction that it's only natural for a writer to work this way.
Her home is certainly conducive to uninterrupted thinking and writing. A modest exterior gives way, first to a cobble-stoned courtyard lined with flowers, then to the main house, surrounding the courtyard in an inverted U, with skylighted rooms walled on one side with sliding glass doors looking out to a grassy woods where a deer obligingly poses beside a small pond. The rooms are carpeted with oriental rugs and are filled with vibrant paintings by Wolf Kahn and intriguing sculptural constructs called "dream boxes" by Gloria Vanderbilt, a close friend with whom she sustains a treasured correspondence. Oates leaves her study mainly to run or walk every day, thinking about her work while she does so.
For a writer who lives mainly in her imagination, a sense of place is vital, and for Oates this means evoking the past. Her expressive brown eyes assume a dreamy gaze. "Writers are people who fall in love with their landscapes," she says. "When I see landscapes that remind me of my childhood, it makes me very happy. I love the farms and I love the little towns. I love the cities like Buffalo. I feel that I know the places. I know what the people are like."
For Oates, who was born in 1938, home was her grandparents' 1880 farmhouse in Lockport, N.Y., a suburb of Buffalo. The farm had animals, chickens, cats. Her grandparents were both Hungarian immigrants, and her grandfather, like many of his generation, was quite a drinker. He began at breakfast, Oates remembers. In addition to his job at a steel mill, he was a blacksmith, capable of hitting a horse on the head with his fist if the animal resisted being shod. He was obviously a strong man, yet he died young, of lung disease undoubtedly related to his factory work. Oates's father also worked in the mills and lived in fear of strikes or being laid off. The outside world was precarious, but the family was stable. While they were poor, they were surrounded by people like themselves, so they were not looking at other lives with a sense of envy. Oates says that she and her brother lived in "a small island of protectiveness."
That protectiveness was gradually breached by glimpses of a wider world through the different school systems in which Oates was educated. First was a one-room rural schoolhouse in Millersport; then she attended junior high in the small city of Lockport. High school was in Williamsville, an affluent suburb of Buffalo, where teachers of a high caliber provided a springboard to Syracuse University. During those years, she became a serious reader of American literature—Poe, Dreiser, Cather, Faulkner, Fitzgerald—and was sensitized to class differences. She realized that class status means more to people who are poor or disenfranchised, and she became acutely aware of the plight of outcasts—blacks, Jews, people who are ugly or mentally disturbed.
One can guess, then, that it was literary influences rather than the proverbial unhappy childhood that shaped Oates's dark imagination and preoccupation with sudden tragedy,
"People laugh at me because I'm always so grateful when something good happens, or that something worse doesn't happen." She recalls a recent conversation with her friend, the social philosopher Peter Singer, whose grandparents were caught up in the Holocaust. "I said I'm grateful when things go right because you never expect it. You expect that it will rain on your birthday or that the plane will crash. Peter and I agreed it's sort of a Jewish thing." (Though of course she is not Jewish.) She laughs and shrugs: it's one of those inexplicable factors that describe her character and determine the tone and fabric of her fiction.
Violence, or the threat of violence, always lurks in the background of her work. Her writing "involves conflict between a seemingly settled, peaceful life and a sudden intrusion of violence. I don't usually write about tragic heroes. I'm more likely to write about women and children who show their strength and courage by overcoming the psychological consequences of violence."
Often the violence is psychological or sexual and was integral to the mysteries Oates wrote under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. Asked about future books in that pipeline, Oates giggles and offers a somewhat impish smile. "She's retired." It seems that those books were getting too complicated, and that Dan Halpern wanted a new author's name. The pseudonymous Lauren Kelly is the author of Take Me, Take Me with You, shorter than her previous mysteries and more like a thriller, Oates says. She's also working on a book with Otto Penzler, to appear in 2005, with short stories whose main characters are women. "I love that genre, I love mysteries," Oates says fervently. "Mystery is essential to our lives. When you're little, everything is a mystery. All families have some secrets." Along with romances, mysteries have their analogues in human psychology, she says.
Oates has been lucky in finding publishers who welcomed the steady pace of her work and encouraged her hopscotching among different genres. Her early books were published by Vanguard Press, an old-fashioned family business whose editor, Evelyn Shrifte was passionate about art and literature. After Shrifte retired, Oates enjoyed a long relationship at Dutton. Among her editors there were the legendary Henry Robbins and the beloved William Abrahams. Dan Halpern bought Blonde for Ecco Press, announcing the book with a major promo campaign, which he plans to repeat for The Falls. "I try not to be hyperbolic, but this book goes beyond anything she has done before," Halpern says. He mentions a "phenomenal response" in-house, among book reps and from bookstore owners who have received early galleys.
Halpern and Oates have extended their friendship with two books they did together, one an anthology called The Sophisticated Cat. (Oates has two cats at the moment, but they are in hiding during PW's visit.) One of Oates's books for children, about a kitten called Reynard, is dedicated to Halpern's daughter, Lily. Oates, Halpern and Russell Banks plan to go to Las Vegas in September for the Oscar de la Hoya fight. Boxing, of course, is a sport on which Oates has written often. She waxes enthusiastic about the succession of immigrants who have dominated the sport over the years. She calls it a true expression of American culture.
It's good that Oates has distractions, because sometimes she sounds pessimistic about the state of American literature. In an essay in The Faith of a Writer, she says, "Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it." She explains: "If you write something serious, you'll probably disturb somebody. I've had hostile criticism my whole career. I feel I have to accept it."
Yet she has come to terms with those expectations in an interesting way, citing the difference between process and product. "Tomorrow morning when I'm at my desk, I'll be writing. That's very real. That's process. When the book comes out in five years, it's then product. The process is what you live in; the product comes at the end. Sometimes it does well, sometimes less well. But it's the process that gives you happiness. You have to be happy in the process. You can't be waiting for some future redemption when you'll be called the greatest writer in the world."
Greatness is for the ages to decide. Meanwhile, The Falls is Oates at her best.
