Joyce Carol Oates Figured Out the Secret to Immortality

 2023

By David Marchese Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya

“I have,” Joyce Carol Oates says, “so many ideas.” That’s putting it mildly. It’s hard to think of another writer with as fecund and protean an imagination as the 85-year-old, who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers. Oates, whose latest is the unsettling short-story collection “Zero-Sum,” has published 62 novels, 47 short-story collections, 16 collections of nonfiction, 9 collections of poetry, plays and books for children and young adults, as well as a torrent of tweets (the latter of which occasionally get her in trouble). The sheer quantity of her output, impressive as it may be, is almost beside the point. The real achievement is that the quality of that work is so consistently high. You can be confident that if you throw a dart at the Oates catalog, you’ll hit a piece of writing that is emotionally intense, full of knife-sharp sentences and painterly description, rich with thematic daring and grave moral and philosophical reckoning (and, now and then, a morbid sense of humor). You can also be confident that there’s more on the way. “I have a stack of notes for my next novel, and another novel, and I have a lot of short stories,” Oates says excitedly. “The one I’m doing now, the reader’s going to be surprised.”

Joyce Carol Oates in 1970.

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Just on that notion of tolerance: How do you see the shift that has occurred in what’s tolerated from writers? A writer like you, or a friend of yours like Philip Roth, could be pretty provocative in a way that feels rare nowadays. Everything is evolutionary, and we have a different consciousness now. Our society is much more obviously diverse than it was when Philip started writing. He was a young Jewish man, but he wasn’t mainstream Jewish in the sense of being religious. He was secular. So he was writing out of that perspective, and he was attacked by older Jewish critics because he seemed like he was sneering at American Jews at a time — after World War II — when that seemed unkind. But he gets a different sensibility as he gets older. It sort of widens. Philip always remained, to some extent, a brash, adolescent voice, and he was best when he was being funny and mocking, but he didn’t seem to have the humanity or capacity of, say, Bernard Malamud. I’m not sure why I got on that subject, but Philip also took a stance against feminism because he felt that was challenging the authority of the white male. His writing was extremely sexist. If you read it from his position, you could still sort of enjoy it. And John Updike’s occasional sexism didn’t bother me at all, because they’re very good writers. People who are younger now, of a different generation than Philip and me and John Updike, see the world differently. They see things in a much more egalitarian way. Like, why not have a lesbian writing from her point of view? Why must it always be the white male? Why would the white writer be wanting to write about a Black subject? It’s not that you can’t do it, but why would you want to when that’s their world and they know that world? A white writer, we have so many things we can do. We don’t have to go over to somebody else’s garden and be picking around.

Oates receiving a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2011.

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I read an old piece you wrote for The New York Times Book Review about the appeal of anonymity for writers and how their work can be affected or hemmed in by the public’s perception of who they are outside the work. Did something flip where now you don’t care about that? It doesn’t matter to you if people might think about you differently because every once in a while you put a howler out there on Twitter? I don’t think about it too much. It may be because I am living alone, and people in my generation, we used to have five conversations a day. That’s all gone. For some people Twitter takes up that time of the day when you’re in your zen consciousness where everything is finite. It’s not permanent, it’s like a flame that flickers and goes out. Also, in quoting something that I said years ago, you’re making a common mistake that people are fixed. That is a philosophical question too: What is essential in your being and what is contingent and accidental? Somebody says to you, “You should be on Twitter because if you post where you’re going to give your readings, people can see where you’re going.” They set it up for you, and you start tweeting. You just sort of go down a dark path. Much of life is accidental.

So you use your own feelings as a way into the story? Yes.

Is it the same process for a story like the new book’s “Mr. Stickum,” where you’re inhabiting a dark, murderous perspective. Presumably that’s something with which you don’t have experience? Well, it’s a collective perspective of girls who are in high school, and they have a certain privilege, and so they think they’re helping girls or women who are made to be sex slaves. But that was a fun story. I have a whole category of fun stories. They are usually very macabre and somewhat over the top. I’m working on a novel now, and it is really a fun novel. I look forward to writing it. I hope it doesn’t get canceled. We’re in an era that I would not have predicted, where a novel could be canceled because of its premise. My goodness. Some of our great, outrageous writers like Nabokov would never get published today.

Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde” (2022), based on Oates’s 2000 book.

Netflix

Often people I interview will say, “That’s not something I think about” or “I haven’t really thought about that.” Exactly.

Could your career happen today? Gosh, I don’t know. I really am an experimental writer, and I sort of downplayed that because experimental writing doesn’t sell. But when I look at a novel by Cormac McCarthy like “Child of God,” that is a novel that I love. I thought, Wow, it’s so funny and weird and wonderful, and I don’t think there’s almost any readership for that. I’m not so interested in mainstream writing. Some of my novels seem to be mainstream writing, but if you’re looking closely, you’ll see that it’s sort of meta, like a simulation of something rather than the actual thing. I have to write that way, I think, in order to even have a publisher.

It’s a bait and switch? I think Cormac McCarthy is exactly like that. But it’s sort of like you’re just doing some unique thing over in the corner of the field. Over here Monet is painting the haystacks and here Van Gogh is painting something different. Then you walk around and there’s Hieronymus Bosch and he’s got this bizarre landscape, and then you walk farther and there’s R. Crumb and then there’s Picasso. These people are looking at the world but their visions are so different. I think that we’re all like that, those of us who have been writing for a while. There’s Emily Dickinson over here, there’s Faulkner, there’s Cormac McCarthy, and I feel I’m in that territory. We’re each doing some odd little thing.