Review by New York Times Review
Criticism as practiced by working critics, Oates asserts in her new collection of essays and reviews, inclines toward preaching or propaganda, always implicitly arguing for a set of beliefs about art or life. Criticism as practiced by creative writers, however, is for Oates a less strident enterprise, since a writer worries about exposing creative sinews. Famously prolific as both critic and imaginative author, Oates bounces here between these critical modes. These essays are often carefully undogmatic. But at times a philosophy creeps in. About great Victorian realists like George Eliot and Charles Dickens, Oates is either dutiful or skeptical; their explorations of compromise and comic social friction feel to her like conformity. A high-modernist, Promethean vocabulary - by now its own kind of consensus - is her touchstone of praise: the unsettling, the rebellious, the subversive. Perhaps as a result, Oates is most engaging when thinking about more eccentric, even marginal, writers. H. P. Lovecraft, Georges Simenon, Derek Raymond, Patrick McGrath: Their stylistic peculiarities, even when they misfire, elicit Oates's sympathy. In a short confessional piece, she admits to being more interested in the view out her study's window than in the room's contents, and to yearning for a view of the sea. It is a Romantic aesthetic, this restlessness for the open and unfettered. The room or the view? How you answer that question will go some distance toward determining how useful a literary guide you find Oates.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 11, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Emily Dickinson is the source for the title of Oates' newest gathering of literary essays and previously published reviews, the first since In Rough Country (2010). The poet is also among other cherished writers, along with Melville, Thoreau, Henry James, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, and E. L. Doctorow, whom Oates cites in her opening essay, based on a lecture delivered at the New York Public Library Is the Uninspired Life Worth Living? In it she tells tales of inspiration catalyzed by place, love, friends, nightmares, and a longing for social justice. Endlessly intrigued by the transformation of experience and feeling into imaginative literature, Oates shares her own motives for writing, including commemoration, bearing witness, and self-expression. Her reviews blossom into full-blown critical inquiries bright with gleanings from her long, deep immersion in literature as she interprets such contemporaries as Margaret Atwood, Anne Tyler, Margaret Drabble, Paul Auster, Jerome Charyn, and Zadie Smith. And how bracing it is when Oates defines art, including the mysterious metaphor, as the wellspring for meaning and our collective memory, an enterprise essential, she argues, to our very survival.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This collection of essays, reviews, and lectures from a reigning doyenne of American letters is a bit of a hodgepodge, but taken as a whole provides an eclectic survey of contemporary American literature. Oates is likely most familiar to readers as a novelist (The Man Without a Shadow) and short story writer. But the author is also one of the U.S.'s keenest literary critics, as the works collected here demonstrate in abundance. The book's first section, "The Writing Life," contains a lecture and a trio of essays. These are generous and engaging, though Oates's Cassandra-ish warnings about the threat social media poses to literary culture may chafe more tech-savvy audiences. In the second section, "Classics," a standout is her invigorating dive into H.P. Lovecraft's contributions to genre and literary fiction. The third section, "Contemporaries," is the largest and most cohesive. Reading these selected reviews, one develops an acute sense of Oates's literary philosophy as she lovingly yet rigorously critiques works by a diverse set of authors, including Derek Raymond and Jeanette Winterson. The final section, "Real Life," contains just one essay and thus feels a bit tacked on, but the piece is a harrowing and thought-provoking work of reportage on a visit to San Quentin Prison, and is well worth readers' time. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
This collection of essays from the award-winning author Oates ranges from observations on the writing life to critical reviews of classic and contemporary works. Additional pieces include commentary on the film The Fighter and details of a visit to San Quentin prison. The selection of 33 previously published essays encompasses a wide range of topics with Oates's pinpoint focus. "Writing Life" essays detail the demise of the 3-D book in spite of her claim that most authors write because of their love of physical books and the stories and information they contain. Oates considers Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch and Mead's lifelong admiration for George Eliot. Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life is acknowledged for its literary craft for applying life to art. Observations on Larry McMurtry's The Last Kind Words Saloon recognize McMurtry's inclusion of "sharp-tongued wives and `whores'" who match the men in the rough Texas environment. Additional authors critiqued include Jeanette Winterson, Anne Tyler, Zadie Smith, Lucia Berlin, J.M. Coetzee, and Paul Auster, among others, and, with a nod to Oates's love of boxing, Mike Tyson. VERDICT Oates's appreciation of books and reading while reflecting on the merit of contemporary authors is inspiring. [See Prepub Alert, 3/28/16.]-Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL © Copyright 2016. 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
Another collection of sparkling literary essays from the prolific author of both fiction and nonfiction.Culled from her literary reviews in the New York Review of Books, the Kenyon Review, and other venues, these short essays probe the reasons we continue to read, both classics and contemporary works, anddespite the torturewrite. Titling her collection after a smoldering line by Emily Dickinson, Oates (Humanities/Princeton Univ.; The Man Without a Shadow, 2016, etc.) finds enormous inspiration (and passionate literary obsession) in pursuing the answer to the age-old question, why do I write? In her initial essay, Is the Uninspired Life Worth Living? which establishes cohesion to the collection, she finds particular resonance with writers who grasp the essential subversive quality of literaturepoets are often seized by a force beyond their control, being not in their right mind, and out of [their] senses, as Plato elucidates in Ion. (Poets, of course, were banned from the Republic because they could not conform to the authority of the state.) Inspired is akin to being haunted or captivated, and in these far-ranging, occasionally didactic essays, Oates delights in authors who have been selectively obsessed and captivated by their material: Rebecca Mead by Middlemarch; Claire Tomalin by Charles Dickens; Julian Barnes harnessing catastrophe into art while writing of the death of his wife of 30 years in Levels of Life. Always eclectic, Oates also includes essays on the visionary detective fiction of Derek Raymond; Wild West fabler Larry McMurtry; Louise Erdrichs North Dakota novels, which Oates compares to William Faulkners Yoknapatawpha County cycle; and, most sensitively, Jeanette Wintersons memoir of coming out to her North England Pentecostal mother. Oates ends with a strange visit to San Quentin prison with a group of female graduate studentsnot to teach, however, but to feel shocked by the experience. As always, Oates is curious, probing, and memorably startling. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
