Contemporary Literary Criticism | Greenberg, Joanne (Goldenberg)

JOYCE CAROL OATES

This group of twelve excellent short stories [Rites of Passage] is all the more remarkable for its being not only artistically "beautiful" but morally and spiritually beautiful as well. Though Miss Greenberg hardly writes of people with happy problems—her characters include the deaf, the wives and mothers of the deaf, the epileptic, isolated farmers who have eased into insanity, young women hemmed in by banal, crushing circumstances, aging men impatient to die and get it accomplished—she is able through her almost miraculous sense of the complexities of the human predicament to make each person, hopeful or hopeless, demonstrate for us a way of surviving.

And yet that sounds grim—"surviving"—and doesn't do justice to the surprising range of energies and inventiveness Miss Greenberg's people possess. In one of the finest stories, "And Sarah Laughed," the wife of a totally deaf man begins to realize, as the years pass, the need...

Contemporary Literary Criticism | Greenberg, Joanne (Goldenberg) - Joyce Carol Oates

JOYCE CAROL OATES

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