Review by New York Times Review
"BLACK DAHLIA & WHITE ROSE" is Joyce Carol Oates's 25 th book of short stories. Her immense productivity - the torrent of novels and stories that began in the early 1960s - means that every release meets with the same question: Does she have anything fresh and urgent to reveal at this point in her long and very fine career? The answer, with her latest, may depend on how you regard Oates's descriptions of older women. The stories in this collection generally involve a combination of macabre events, fantastical turns and unguarded first-person storytelling. Throughout, Oates explores the rough fortunes of (mostly) women who think they're in control of their situations but are inevitably proved wrong, sometimes brutally so. The title story juxtaposes two aspiring starlets from 1940s Los Angeles. One, Elizabeth Short, was rechristened "the Black Dahlia" by the gutter press during a lurid murder investigation occasioned by the discovery of her mangled body, split apart at the torso. In Oates's rendition, Betty speaks from beyond the grave about how she lived and died, and also offers a catty running commentary on her roommate, a certain Norma Jeane Baker. This fragile "White Rose" interests a strange, shy doctor who secretly attends their photo shoots and eventually invites both women to dinner. Wiser and (by her own flawed reckoning) more alluring, Betty deceitfully gets the doctor all to herself, and while he's kissing, chloroforming and butchering her, we hear from Norma Jeane, who's upset because Betty has failed to pick her up from the bar where they'd planned to meet. She has acting class in the morning, and likes to look good for it. "It is always an audition," she declares, in a line that resonates with historical irony and immediate import. "You don't know who is observing you." In writing again about Marilyn Monroe 12 years after her novel "Blonde," Oates doesn't reimagine her subject in any notable ways; instead she uses Monroe's precelebrity life to add a speculative dimension to an already enjoyable bit of noir fiction. How different might American pop culture have been if sexy, angelic Norma Jeane Baker had been the unknown young actress who'd gone to dinner with a murderous voyeur rather than sexy, vampish Elizabeth Short? With its strong contrast of dark and light sensibilities, voices and fates, this first story seems to offer an interpretive key to the rest of the collection. But few of the following stories sustain that much scrutiny. The weaker ones read like strained experiments (a narrator watching a trapped bird in the Newark airport is so moved by its predicament that she grows wings) or mechanical exercises in building psychological and emotional suspense (a bored woman becomes too involved with an unstable stranger searching for his possibly murdered wife; a sneering young man plots to publicly embarrass the famous father who never acknowledged him). Other stones concern downward-trending older women, their interior funks and their desperate efforts to overcome the unremitting demands of motherhood, marriage and careers. In "Spotted Hyenas: A Romance," the suburban wife of a pharmaceutical executive has dreamlike, bestial encounters at night, which inspire her to look up a field biologist she knew in graduate school. In "Anniversary," a smug academic seeks new purpose by condescendingly teaching inmates, only to die from a casual oversight involving a purloined pencil sharpener. These stories, so very different in premise and action, attest to Oates's always impressive range, but a minor detail suggests a symptomatic flaw. Both the suburban wife and the smug academic wear black cashmere-and-wool combinations: "sharply creased" slacks and a "tiny, tightfitting" jacket in one case, and "a short, trim jacket" and "fitted trousers" in the other. This could be an intentional, imagistic doubling in stories that appear quite close to each other, meant to convey subtle insights about the predicament of stylish, older women seeking vital experiences through misconceived means. Then again, it might simply be rote prose from a writer so practiced at what she does so well that the struggle for a new angle of approach is long gone, even if that doesn't stop her from going on and on. Randy Boyagoda's latest novel is "Beggar's Feast."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 20, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
In the crisply unnerving title story in her latest, masterfully honed collection of dark tales, Oates audaciously improvises on the rumor that Marilyn Monroe the subject of her novel Blonde (2000) was friends with Elizabeth Short, who was dubbed the Black Dahlia after her gruesome, unsolved 1947 murder. In I.D. and Deceit, Oates channels the inner frequencies of girls endangered by family violence. In The Good Samaritan, she lures us into a small world of depthless subtleties and sorrows as a lonely young composer becomes embroiled in the troubles of strangers. As commanding and definitive as her psychologically charged portraits are, Oates cannily leaves the denouements of her most intense and haunting tales open to interpretation. In several staggering tales, Oates maps the frozen hell of loveless marriages and unsought solitude as women experience hallucinogenic ruptures in reality while navigating an airport, a prison, and Rome, that fabled city of ghosts. With precision and force, the ever-mesmerizing Oates rips open the scrim of ordinariness to expose the chaos that undermines every human notion of control, reason, and sanctuary. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Virtuoso Oates' twenty-fifth story collection will be nationally promoted on all fronts, from print to radio to online media.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The new short story collection from the prolific Oates (after the novel Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You) contains sinister and charged moments tempered by humor and masterful storytelling. The title tale blends fact and fiction and narrates the intertwining lives of two young women in 1940s Hollywood, roommates whose lives diverge as one becomes an internationally acclaimed actress (Marilyn Monroe), and the other (Elizabeth Short) the victim of a gruesome, unsolved murder case. In "Deceit," a woman must face school authorities to explain the fresh bruises on her daughter's body, and in "Run Kiss Daddy," a man is given a second chance at life with a "beautiful new family small and vulnerable as a mouse cupped trembling in the hand," but is confronted by old ghosts when he takes them to a favorite vacation spot and unearths something morbid. Unsettling, potent, and suspenseful, these well-crafted and haunting stories attest to Oates' superior imagination and mastery of the craft, and provide a welcome addition to her oeuvre. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
By titling this volume of 11 previously uncollected stories with a reference to "Black Dahlia," Oates lets the reader know that these stories are headed in a dark direction. Black Dahlia was the nickname given to Elizabeth Short, a young woman brutally murdered in Los Angeles in 1947. In the collection's first story, Oates imagines Elizabeth as an aspiring actress whose roommate is one Norma Jeane Baker, soon to become Marilyn Monroe. The other stories are widely varied but have the common theme of the dark or strange or, in the case of "Spotted Hyenas: A Romance," elements of the fantastic. The author never shies away from the painful (a young girl asked to identify a body that might be her own mother), the uncomfortable (a drug-addled, probably abusive mother), or the frightening (vulnerable visitors in a maximum-security prison), but she is never cruel or unfeeling, nor without humor. VERDICT Another winner for Oates, featuring well-crafted stories that leave the reader tense and uneasy, but captivated just the same.-Shaunna Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA (c) Copyright 2012. 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 gallery of grotesquerie from the staggeringly prolific Oates. This latest collection of Oates' previously published short stories (the sheer range of venues, from Playboy to Ellery Queen, The New Yorker to video game-inspired e-fiction is an indication of her vast reach) showcases her talent for imbuing mundane events with menace and the kind of irony that springs from narrow brushes with disaster. Thus, in the title story, the depraved serial killer of a Hollywood pinup model known as Black Dahlia could, but for circumstance, just as easily have targeted the starlet who would become Marilyn Monroe. Protagonists are drawn, with equal authority, from the underclass and the self-satisfied professional class. In "I.D.," a pre-adolescent whose single mother has left her alone for days desperately clings to normalcy even as she's being called out of class, possibly to identify her mother's body. In two stories, "Roma!" and "Spotted Hyenas: A Romance," middle-aged women married to prominent, uncommunicative men act out in diverse ways, from a frightening foray down Rome's back alleys to a walk on the wild side as a were-hyena. ("A Brutal Murder in a Public Place" is a more contrived attempt at human/animal identification.) Narrators can be so subtly unreliable as to force readers to question their own perceptions. In "Deceit," a mother summoned to discuss her child's possible abuse may be the perpetrator--her memory has been ravaged by anti-anxiety meds. The divorced father in "Run Kiss Daddy," attempting to start again with a new family in a favorite vacation spot, uncovers evidence of a long-ago crime that could be his own. A young woman who finds a wallet on a train injects herself capriciously and dangerously into a family of strangers. The linked stories "San Quentin" and "Anniversary" cover the excruciating discomfort--and unmistakable voyeurism--of well-meaning individuals teaching in maximum security prisons. Although her material can be macabre, mawkish and deeply unsettling, Oates' hypnotic prose ensures that readers will be unable to look away.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
