High lonesome New & selected stories, 1966-2006

Review by Booklist Review

The Oates universe is tense and overcast when it isn't under assault by grimly devastating storms. An expert in the causes and effects of obsession, desolation, and annihilation, Oates has crafted hundreds of mesmerizing short stories of acute social and psychological insights, sinister sexuality, and stark violence. Nine new, hard-hitting stories of fractured families, death, and longing kick off this supreme retrospective collection. High Lonesome tracks the absurd and tragic circumstances that instigate a suicide and a revenge killing. In Spider Boy, a son helplessly reveals the shocking truth about his father. In \lquote The Cousins, a woman writes to the thorny author of a controversial Holocaust memoir, certain that they're related. Oates even offers a chilling biotech cautionary tale. Two-dozen standout stories from the past four decades follow these new works, beginning with a harrowing tale of a hurricane, Upon the Sweeping Flood, and moving on to quintessential Oatesean tales of cataclysms seeded in the human heart. Oates' daring oeuvre, immense in size, depth, and spirit, will stand as a pillar in American literature, and this collection of stories that Oates feels are her best is as significant as it is breathtaking. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This hefty collection, featuring 10 new pieces along with stories culled from four decades, further establishes the prolific and wide-ranging Oates as a gifted chronicler of American culture. The theme of girls and women preyed upon by violent men appears repeatedly, as in the much-anthologized "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1970) but also in lesser-known pieces like "Small Avalanches" (1974), which turns the tables, as a 13-year-old girl, nimble and laughing, evades a middle-aged, panting lech on a deserted path. Several stories feature characters whose mental instabilities lead to violence, as in "Last Days" (1984), in which a brilliant, manic college student with a Messiah complex assassinates a rabbi, then turns the gun on himself. Though Oates's world is often ugly, she also displays a more fanciful (if still creepy) impulse; the recent piece "Fat Man My Love" finds actress "Pippi" (indubitably Tippi Hedren) puzzling over the director (an unnamed Hitchcock) who both created and ruined her career. While the lurid events of some stories have a ripped-from-the-headlines feel, Oates is never merely sensational, tracking hidden motives and emotions with a sharp eye for psychological detail-everything conveyed in lucid, rhythmic prose. However much is made of her prodigious output, it's the consistent quality of the work that lifts Oates into the literary pantheon. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Like a successful rock band putting together a best-of compilation CD, Oates (The Falls) has compiled stories from her 40 years of writing along with nine new ones. Although from her afterword it is not clear that she considers these her best, they do provide a sample of her work. Seven of the nine new opening stories focus on families in disarray, e.g., the title work tells of the unsolved murder of the narrator's stepbrother, while "The Fish Factory" examines the extremes to which a teenage girl goes to escape her overprotective mother. The volume then flashes back to the 1960s and works forward by decade. The first decade's stories exhibit an inventiveness exemplified by "Four Summers," in which a girl's experience over four summers makes her satisfied with her life decisions. The 1970s stories are highlighted by "The Lady with the Pet Dog" and "The Tryst," which reveal two different extramarital affairs that go bad, and the mysterious "Night Side" about investigating s?ances. The 1980s stories, such as "My Warszawa: 1980" about a writer's experience at a conference in Communist Poland, reflect Oates's ability to create ironic and often eerie episodes. The 1990s stories are the best in the volume. "The Hair" deals with social hierarchies as two couples become friendly, while stories like "Life After High School," about an outcast student, and "Mark of Satan," which follows a Christian missionary's visit to an ex-con, explore themes of alienation and loneliness in dramatic fashion. For Oates fans and readers who want an overview of her ability to create a snapshot in time, this is an excellent volume. Recommended for larger collections.-Joshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An imposing collection of 35 stories. Of the 25 stories reprinted here from earlier volumes, the best include a searching treatment of religious experience ("In the Region of Ice"); rich homages to literary masters ("The Dead," "The Lady with the Pet Dog"); a haunting exploration of spiritualism ("Night-Side"); a nicely detailed racetrack story ("Raven's Wing"); and one of the author's creepiest depictions of adolescent sexual confusion ("Heat"). The principle of selection explained in a brief Afterword doesn't account for the omission of some of Oates's very best-- notably, one of her finest deployments of symbolism, in "First Views of the Enemy" (since reworked in several later stories) and the compact Dreiserian masterpiece "Waiting." The new stories vary in quality largely according to the degree to which they're overplotted. "*BD* 11 1 87," for example, painstakingly builds a wrenching characterization of a lonely, orphaned high-school senior inexplicably discouraged from realizing his considerable potential--then throws it away as the story spins into banal near-futuristic fantasy. The title story, about an aging farmer destroyed when he's caught in a vice squad sting, almost collapses when emphasis shifts to revenge taken on his behalf--but Oates gives it conviction through understatement and deft pacing. "The Lost Brother," which describes a middleaged woman's determined, doomed search for her estranged sibling, works brilliantly, as everything left unsaid eloquently ensnares the reader. Other stories deal all too predictably and heatedly with shattered families ("Spider-Boy," "Soft-Core," "The Cousins") and sexual violence ("The Fish Factory," "The Gathering Squall," "In Hot May"). Then there's "Fat Man My Love," an ironic remembrance of an adipose film-industry giant by one of his "Ice Blondes," which does to the memory of Alfred Hitchcock what Oates did to Marilyn Monroe in the wretched novel Blonde. Who's next? Shirley Temple? Dame Edith Evans? Lassie? Enough, already. Otherwise, a longstanding literary need somewhat successfully addressed with this collection. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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High Lonesome Stories 1966-2006 Chapter One Spider Boy "There are places in the world where people vanish." His father had said this. His father had spoken flatly, without an air of mystery or threat. It was not a statement to be challenged and it was not a statement to be explained. Later, when his father had vanished out of his life, he would summon back the words as a kind of explanation and in anxious moments he would mis--hear the words as There are places in the world where people can vanish . Still later, when he had not seen his father in a long time, or what seemed to him a long time, months, or maybe just weeks, he would try to summon the words again, exactly as his father had uttered them, but by this time he'd become uncertain, anxious. Where people can vanish, or where people vanish? It was such a crucial distinction! "Remember your new name. Think before you answer. Not just, 'What's your name?' but any question. It helps to lick your lips. That will give you time not to make a mistake you can't unmake." Yet not his name but his surname was the issue. For his surname had been so disgraced there had come to be a fascination in its forbidden sound. The elided consonants and vowels, the lift of its final syllable, an expression of (possibly mocking) surprise like an arched eyebrow. In private, in his secret places, he spoke the forbidden name aloud in mimicry of newscasters who gave to it an air of intrigue and reproach. Sometimes in his bed at night in his new room in his grandparents' house he pressed his face deeply into the pillow and spoke the forbidden name, each syllable equally and defiantly stressed -- Szaa ra. He spoke the name until his breath ran out and his lungs ached and through his body raced a half--pleasurable panic that he would smother. A pillow. Where his mouth was, wet with saliva. Where his teeth gnawed. A pillow is a comforting thing when your head rests on it, but if a pillow is pressed against your face, if you are lying on your back and a pillow is pressed against your face, you could not summon the strength to push it away and save yourself. "YES. We've moved out of state." Before even the impeachment hearings his mother had filed for divorce from their father. But before even she'd filed for divorce she'd moved them -- Emily, Philip, herself -- into her parents' big stone house overlooking the Hudson River at Nyack, New York. Now it was a drive of several hours to the old house in Trenton, overlooking the Delaware River. On the map, it was really not very far but there was an air of distance and finality in his mother's frequently repeated words: "Out of state." Out of state caught in Philip's mind, uttered in his mother's breathless yet adamant voice. As you might say out of space, out of time. Out of danger, out of harm. Out of toxic contagion. In this new state it was essential to have a new name. To replace and nullify the old, disgraced name. Quickly! -- before Emily and Philip were enrolled in their new schools. "Yes, we think it's best. Separate schools." Private day schools. Nyack Academy for Emily, who was fifteen and in her second year of high school, Edgerstoune School for Philip, who would be thirteen in August, and would enter eighth grade. In New Jersey both children had gone to the Pennington Academy, in a northern Trenton suburb. Sometimes their mother drove them to school, sometimes one of their father's assistants. There was a private bus provided by the school, of the identical bright--pumpkin hue of public school buses but only one--third the size. Riding on this bus, they'd never sat together and acknowledged each other only politely, with diffident smiles. For a few weeks during the impeachment hearings they'd continued to attend the Pennington Academy, but when criminal charges were brought against their father and the impeachment hearings ceased, their mother had removed them from school. "It has to be done. They can't be made to suffer for him. They are only children." In Nyack, it soon became official: they had a new name. Where Szaara had been, now there was Hudgkins . Where Philip Szaara had been, now there was Philip Hudgkins . Where Emily Szaara had been, now there was Emily Hudgkins . For this wasn't a "new" new name, of course. It was their Nyack grandparents' name which they'd long known and with which they had, their mother insisted, only happy associations. Their mother would take up again her old, "maiden" name with relief. During the sixteen years of her marriage to the New Jersey politician Roy Szaara she had retained Hudgkins as her middle name, she'd continued to be known by certain of her women friends, with whom she'd gone to Bryn Mawr, as Miriam Hudgkins. And so: "It isn't a great change. It's more like coming back home." She smiled bravely. She smiled defiantly. She had had her hair cut and restyled and she had a new way of clasping, at waist level, her shaky left hand in her more forceful right hand, as a practiced tennis player might clasp a racket. "I mean, it is coming home. Where we belong." " 'SPIDER BOY.' " You might have thought that "Spider Boy" was in playful reference to the comic strip/movie superhero "-Spider--man" but in fact Philip had no interest in Spider--man as he had no interest in the comics, action films and video games that so captivated other boys. " 'Spider Boy.' " It was a way of evoking the haunting and powerful presence that existed now entirely in memory. Except for a single memento (smelly, ugly, of a clumsy size and in no way to be mistaken for something of Philip's own) kept in a secret place in his room, Philip might begin to consider whether Spider Boy had ever existed. For he understood He has vanished without having needed to be told. High Lonesome Stories 1966-2006 . Copyright © by Joyce Oates. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories, 1966-2006 by Joyce Carol Oates All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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