Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Brophy, Brigid (Antonia) - Joyce Carol Oates

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JOYCE CAROL OATES

What is depressing about Brigid Brophy's sixth novel [In Transit: An Heroi-Cyclic Novel] is not its echoes of a horde of other writers, among them the Olympian Joyce, but that the echoes are so painfully feeble, the bizarre wit of the "avant-garde" novel here so hopelessly halved, that the reader feels a kind of desperation in his desire to come upon something good in all these pages—something intelligent, something original and striking—something. (p. 4)

It is difficult to sense when Miss Brophy is being consciously comic (though I suspect the entire novel can be defended as a "comic" novel); but I am fairly certain that the very ending is meant to be a joke: a simple line drawing of a fish, with the helpful word FIN on its lowermost fin.

But a novel must be about something. It can't simply establish itself as the stream-of-consciousness of an argumentative, clever, modish woman of middle age. And so In Transit is...

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1. Introduction
2. The Times Literary Supplement
3. Gene Baro
4. Pearl Kazin
5. Dan Wickenden
6. Charles J. Rolo
7. Maurice Richardson
8. The Times Literary Supplement
9. Joseph L. Quinn
10. Martin Tucker
11. Eve Auchincloss
12. Naomi Bliven
13. The Times Literary Supplement
14. Anthony Burgess
15. Victor Strauss
16. Anthony Burgess
17. Alan Levensohn
18. Edward Weeks
19. Joyce Carol Oates
20. Time
21. Hermione Lee
22. Alan Hollinghurst
23. Marilyn Butler
24. Copyright

1. Joyce Carol Oates