Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is a phenomenal writer. Utterly amazing. Her short stories are nothing if not jaw-dropping with their intensity. If I had to choose one writer to study under, to learn from, this professor at Princeton would be the one.
Mind you–I have yet to read her novel-length works. Her short stories floor me every time.
So, when I stumbled across a link to one of her short stories published in The New Yorker magazine, I had to post that link here.
An excerpt:
“For an eiii-dee,” they were saying. “We need to see Lisette Mulvey.”
This was unexpected.
In second-period class, at 9:40 A.M., on some damn Monday in some damn winter month she’d lost track of, when even the year—a “new” year—seemed weird to her, like a movie set in a faraway galaxy.
It was one of those school mornings—some older guys had got her high on beer, for a joke. Well, it was funny, not just the guys laughing at her but Lisette laughing at herself. Not mean-laughing—she didn’t think so—but like they liked her. “Liz-zette”—“Liz-zette”—was their name for her, high-pitched piping like bats, and they’d run their fingers fast along her arms, her back, like she was scalding hot to the touch.
They picked her up on their way to school. The middle school was close to the high school. Most times, she was with a girlfriend—Keisha or Tanya. They were mature girls for their age—Keisha, especially—and not shy like the other middle-school girls. They knew how to talk to guys, and guys knew how to talk to them, but it was just talk mostly.
Now this was—math?—damn math class that Lisette hated. It made her feel so stupid. Not that she was stupid. It was just that sometimes her thoughts were as snarled as her hair, her eyes leaking tears behind her dark-purple-tinted glasses—pres-ciption lenses—so that she couldn’t see what the hell the teacher was scribbling on the board, not even the shape of it. Ms. Nowicki would say in her bright hopeful voice, “Who can help me here? Who can tell us what the next step is?” and most of the kids would just sit on their asses, staring. Smirking. Not wanting to be called on. But then Lisette was rarely called on in math class—sometimes she shut her eyes, pretending that she was thinking really hard, and when she opened them there was one of the three or four smart kids in the class at the board, taking the chalk from Nowicki. She tried to watch, and she tried to comprehend. But there was something about the sound of the chalk clicking on the board—not a black board, it was green—and the numerals that she was expected to make sense of: she’d begin to feel dizzy.
Her mother, Yvette, had no trouble with numbers. She was a blackjack dealer at the Casino Royale. You had to be smart, and you had to think fast—you had to know what the hell you were doing—to be a blackjack dealer.
Counting cards. This was forbidden. If you caught somebody counting cards you signalled for help. Yvette liked to say that one day soon she would change her name, her hair color, and all that she could about herself, and drive out to Vegas, or to some lesser place, like Reno, and play blackjack in such a way that they’d never catch on—counting cards like no amateur could do.
But if Lisette said, “You’re going to take me with you, Momma, O.K.?” her mother would frown as if Lisette had said something really dumb, and laugh. “Sweetie, I’m just joking. Obviously you don’t fuck with these casino guys.”
Vegas or Reno wasn’t where she’d gone this time. Lisette was certain of that. She hadn’t taken enough clothes.
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An article in the same edition of The New Yorker was an interview with Ms. Oates (Dr. Oates?).
A taste:
Often your stories seem to pick up on news items and then carry them in new directions. Do you find it helpful to have that grain of reality in mind when embarking on a piece of fiction? How do you decide how much real life to use and how much to invent?
In a way, it’s the reverse: I begin with a character, a situation, a “drama,” a “turn of the screw”—some sort of revelation or surprise—then find the appropriate setting or circumstances for it. In the case of “I.D.,” it was a traumatic experience in my personal life, when I didn’t quite have the strength or the moral courage to be the one to make an I.D. of an individual close to me; a friend had to make the I.D. instead. And so the theme of “identifying” the deceased has haunted me. I could write many, many stories on this subject!
Read it all.
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