The lost landscape A writer's coming of age

Joyce Carol Oates, 1938-

Book - 2015

A chronicle of the author's hardscrabble childhood in rural western New York State describes the family members, first friendships, and early experiences with death that shaped her literary career.

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Subjects
Published
New York, NY : Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers [2015]
©2015.
Language
English
Main Author
Joyce Carol Oates, 1938- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xiii, 353 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780062408679
  • Author's Note
  • I.
  • We Begin
  • Mommy & Me
  • Happy Chicken: 1942-1944
  • Discovering Alice: 1947
  • District School #7, Niagara County, New York
  • Piper Cub
  • After Black Rock
  • Sunday Drive
  • Fred's Signs
  • "They All Just Went Away"
  • "Where Has God Gone"
  • Headlights: The First Death
  • "The Brush"
  • An Unsolved Mystery: The Lost Friend
  • "Start Your Own Business!"
  • The Lost Sister: An Elegy
  • Nighthawk: Recollections of a Lost Time
  • II.
  • Detroit: Lost City 1962-1968
  • Story Into Film: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" and Smooth Talk
  • Photo Shoot: West Eleventh Street, NYC, March 6, 1970
  • Food Mysteries
  • Facts, Visions, Mysteries: My Father Frederic Oates, November 1988
  • A Letter to My Mother Carolina on Her Seventy-Eighth Birthday, November 8, 1994
  • "When I Was A Little Girl and My Mother Didn't Want Me"
  • III.
  • Excerpt, Telephone Conversation With My Father Frederic Oates, May 1999
  • The Long Romance
  • My Mother's Quilts
  • Afterword
Review by New York Times Review

JOYCE CAROL OATES is an ambivalent memoirist. In "The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age," she repeatedly expresses her doubts about first-person autobiographical writing. For one thing, she's deeply wary of the confessional voice. For another, she has little faith in the reliability of memory. While she can vouch for the accuracy of "A Widow's Story," her 2011 account of the aftermath of her first husband's death, which she based on contemporaneous journals, she can hardly back up this latest memoir with documentation. No small child, not even a Joyce Carol Oates, could be expected to take notes all day. Yet another problem: The memoirist is obliged to leave things out. "To charges of distortion," she writes, "I can only say - mea culpa." This apology is tongue-in-cheek - Oates is not so much admitting fault as complaining that memoir is a compromised and compromising genre - but her tone grows more serious when she speaks of memoiristic betrayals. "Nothing," she writes, "is more offensive than an adult child exposing his or her elderly parents to the appalled fascination of strangers." This is a little high-minded for most memoirists, but Oates shows her true alienation from the genre when she observes that "not individuals but rather events and occasions - prevailing 'themes' - are what engage me most as a writer, for nothing merely particular and private can be of more than passing interest." Here is a true fiction writer's credo. For the memoirist, nearly the opposite is true. Especially in a memoir of childhood, the mission is to preserve the private and the particular, to make the transitory eternal. In spite of these anti-memoiristic rumblings, "The Lost Landscape" remains indisputably a memoir. Like many these days, it's not continuous, and is composed almost entirely of previously published essays. In this case, some reach back to the 1990s and even the 1980s. The greater part of the book is arranged chronologically. Small, tightly focused pieces alternate with substantial narratives to make a satisfying whole, giving the reader a coherent account of Oates's childhood and adolescence. The last quarter is a pastiche of pieces and fragments without a through-line. For all of Oates's doubts about the primacy of the particular and the private, "The Lost Landscape" is full of specifically memoiristic pleasures. She offers pungent details about the small New York State farm where she was raised: Roosters chase away barn cats, hens attack one another, Bartlett pears begin to soften and bruise the moment they ripen. Her characterizations of her parents are blurred by filial reverence, but she gives the reader a good hard look at her Hungarian grandparents. A short piece called "The Brush" neatly captures Oates's rough, dirty, handsome, teasing grandfather, who loved her and whom she dreaded. Hers was truly a writer's childhood, safe and happy at the center but ringed by forbidden territories she nevertheless set out to explore, sometimes physically and sometimes in imagination. In "Happy Chicken 1942-1944," which is narrated by Oates's favorite Rhode Island Red (an arch conceit, but it works), Oates is shown as a little girl, carting around this adored fowl, so much brighter and more alert than the other hens. Oates in turn was prized by her parents, who kept things from her. One day the favored chicken was gone, we all know where. Oates searched for her in vain. The imperative to investigate what her parents concealed became, eventually, the impetus for Oates's writing. This is the theme of the essay "They All Just Went Away," which begins with a spectacular, sustained evocation of the dangerous joy of trespassing. In her childhood wanderings, Oates was repeatedly drawn to explore the burnt-out house in the woods where the Judd family (an invented name) had once lived squalidly, where the children - Oates knew them - were beaten and sexually abused by their drunken father. One night, in a rage, he set fire to the place. Oates watched the conflagration from a window in her own safe, well-kept house. ("Like all great events of long ago," she writes, "it was an adult occasion.") After this, the father went to jail and the family scattered. The older daughter, Helen, with whom Oates had once shared a wary, intermittent friendship, eventually turned up in the special-ed classroom at Oates's junior high school. Oates tried to reach out to her, but was gently rebuffed. By now, shame had taught Helen Judd to accept her place as an outcast. Perhaps because she prefers to deflect the narrative spotlight rather than occupy it, doppelgängers begin to show up in Oates's accounts of adolescence. The first of these appears in "An Unsolved Mystery: The Lost Friend." This is Cynthia Heike (another alias), a high school friend. Like Oates, she was bright, ambitious and driven, but, unlike Oates, deeply troubled. Undermined by a critical father, she committed suicide at 18. The rapport and rivalry between these two promising girls is marvelously dramatized, as is Oates's persistent guilt at having survived her. Another mirror-self appears in "The Lost Sister: An Elegy." Lynn Ann Oates was born on Joyce Carol's 18 th birthday, a replica of her older sister physically, but profoundly autistic. Oates's parents, who have been happily devoted to their gifted older daughter, are sadly devoted to this tragically defective younger one. Her care devours their lives. But Lynn Ann is not only mute and unreachable, she also reveals a tendency to violence, and eventually must be institutionalized. In an excruciating irony, she destroys the books her sister brings home on a visit, leaving tooth marks on what remains of a treasured edition of "The Golden Bowl," with an "all but impenetrable introduction by R. P. Blackmur." In "Nighthawk: Recollections of a Lost Time," Oates goes on to tell the story of her years as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, where loneliness and academic pressure so overwhelmed her that she developed insomnia and tachycardia. Ultimately, an unsympathetic (male) professor sabotaged her oral exams. As a result, she was awarded a terminal M.A., the worst possible affront to a graduate student. But it could have been worse; the doppelgänger in this piece is Oates's beloved friend Marianna Mason Churchland (an alias), who broke down completely and withdrew from the program. Even as Oates suffered under the weight of the graduate curriculum, she found happiness in her engagement and marriage to Raymond Smith. But, oddly enough, no sooner does Oates introduce him to the reader than she abruptly pulls down the narrative curtain. "I am sorry," she writes, "but I am not able to write about Ray here." "Oh," thinks the startled reader, who had been following along sympathetically, "I hadn't meant to pry." But another thought immediately follows: Why, the reader wonders, is Oates telling us what she isn't going to tell us? Why doesn't she just - not tell us? The memoirist, after all, is free to work around material she finds too painful to discuss, to set the boundaries of her narrative wherever she chooses. But, all along, Oates has rejected the terms of the memoir. Now, having nearly completed the chronologically connected body of the book, she seems to turn away from the reader as well. It's an odd, alienating way to leave things. The hodgepodge of biographical scraps she offers in the last two brief sections - a loosely woven reminiscence about her father, a list of favorite foods from the 1950s, journal entries, philosophical ruminations, a poem in tribute to her mother, an excerpt from a phone call with her father - does little to make up for the reader's disappointment. A novelist who harbors serious reservations about memoirs has written another one. EMILY FOX GORDON is the author of "Book of Days: Personal Essays."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In her new memoir following in the wake of the best-selling A Widow's Story (2011), Oates reflects with piquant wit, startling frankness, and mesmerizing specificity on the aspects of her life that made her a writer. Such as the fact that her favorite playmate when she was a little girl on a small, faltering farm in western New York State was Happy Chicken, who mysteriously disappeared on the very day her beloved town grandmother brought her to the public library for her first library card. Deep down Oates knew her pet hen's cruel fate. It's just that she tried not to dwell on the grim realities of her world, which included the traumatic secrets of her poor, struggling Hungarian and Irish immigrant relatives and the meanness and brutality of the older boys in her one-room schoolhouse. Oates found refuge in books, and, as a chronic insomniac, she prowled, alone and at risk in the night, the land that so deeply influences her work. Amid redolent descriptions of Sunday drives, laundry on the line, playing the piano, and tricky friendships, Oates pays tribute to her parents and tells the wrenching story of her sister, born, on the writer's eighteenth birthday, afflicted with such severe autism that she has no language. Generous in her personal disclosures in this graceful and bracing chronicle, Oates also considers the writer's calling and the necessity and resonance of sympathy. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Given the popularity of Oates' previous memoir, this spellbinding coming-of-age narrative, backed by an author tour and an extensive media campaign, will be a veritable readers' magnet.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"I scarcely remember myself as a child. Only as an eye, an ear, a ceaselessly inquisitive center of consciousness," Oates (A Widow's Story) admits, and so this memoir of her early life strings together the recollections that most deeply impressed her consciousness. They reveal an intensely shy, nervous, self-admittedly secretive child, as easily moved to terror as to wonder at the formative mysteries of childhood: the loss of a beloved pet chicken and later a grandfather, the sense of living in a landscape and a family haunted by violence, the acquisition of a library card and the discovery that "adult writing was a form of wisdom and power." The essays, many previously published elsewhere, range stylistically, but when Oates falls into her narrative strengths-an alert eye for detail, an atmosphere suffused with dread and apprehension, an enormous sympathy for her characters-the pieces become stunning, as in accounts of a childhood friend lost to suicide ("The Lost Friend"), time spent in graduate school in Madison, Wisc. ("Nighthawk"), and Oates's autistic younger sister ("The Lost Sister"). A fascination with the quirks of fate that concatenate into a life, and a long, deeply felt love for her parents, thematically unite this varied, kaleidoscopic, and ultimately insightful map to the formation of a writer who understands "how deeply mysterious the `familiar' really is." Photos. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Oates (Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor of the Humanities, Princeton Univ.), a prolific writer by any standard, recounts here how and why she became a writer. Growing up in rural western New York, she lived on her family's farm, bonded with a hen, fell in love with Alice in Wonderland, and came to understand some harsh realities at an early age. Much like Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings and Mary Ward Brown's Fanning the Spark, Oates writes about her formative years with clear vision. Her use of vignette gives the book the dreamt quality that some readers will associate with her fiction. VERDICT Readers of Oates's best-selling memoir, A Widow's Story, will appreciate this new account, as will fans of her earlier fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 3/16/15.]-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence © Copyright 2015. 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.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Glimpses of the iconic writer's youth. Oates (Humanities/Princeton Univ.; Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories, 2014, etc.), the highly prolific author and winner of many prestigious literary awards, gathers 28 pieces, most revised from previous publications, into a tender, often moving evocation of the physical and emotional landscapes that have shaped her. Although she has published a volume of journals, an account of her grief after her husband's sudden death, and many personal essays, Oates portrays herself as a reluctant memoirist. She worries about "violating my own self" and "exposing my very heart," as well as writing "anything that disturbs, offends, or betrays any other person's privacy." Recalling a friend who committed suicide and another who was sexually abused, Oates felt compelled to change details, as well as to create "a quasi-fictitious character named Joyce'who is almost entirely an observermore emotionally detached (and more naive) in the memoir than I had been in actual life." Nevertheless, she reveals some intimate details: a childhood plagued by shyness, self-doubt, and anxiety; recurrent insomnia; the mystery and burden of having an autistic sister; and feeling like an outsider at Syracuse University ("as a scholarship girl I was a spy in the house of mirth"). As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she was "profoundly disillusioned" by her professors' stultifying approach to literary analysis. She fell in love and married, but her husband remains a shadowy figure, his memory too precious to share with readers. Oates identifies the roots of some works: a serial murder case inspired the much-anthologized "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" and her experience living in Detroit informed several novels. The circuitous, impressionistic narrative returns often to her parents, "extraordinary people morally," whom she portrays in loving detail. Though her past seems to her fragmentary and elusive, what she remembersor imaginesis warmly, gently told. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.