Oates, Joyce Carol (Vol. 1) - Oates, Joyce Carol 1938–
Oates, Joyce Carol 1938–
An American short story writer and novelist, Miss Oates is the author of them, With Shuddering Fall, and Expensive People. She has won a National Book Award. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)
[The questions posed by Joyce Carol Oates in Expensive People] are the kind of puzzle we find in all those instances of the satirist satirized, of the rage that is looked at skeptically and perhaps undercut, whether it be the misanthropy of Gulliver or the outrage of John Osborne's early heroes. The puzzles are only as compelling as the rage over which they play, and this vision of the American family and the larger patterns of our suburban subculture has a somewhat tiresome familiarity…. If all that rage confers is a vision in its own way rather conventional, the puzzles lose their urgency and begin to seem labored, as this book does in spite of its occasional brilliance.
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