Oates, Joyce Carol (Vol. 3) - Oates, Joyce Carol 1938–

Oates, Joyce Carol 1938–

Ms. Oates is an American novelist, short story writer, critic, poet, and playwright now living in Canada. Obsessed with the social and psychological problems that torment contemporary men and women, Ms. Oates is a compulsive writer, building in her peculiarly colorless style a formidable body of work around her principal themes: fear, pain, love, and dreams. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)

For all her energy and intelligence as a novelist, Miss Oates still seems uneasy about her subject matter and her own interest in it. Expensive People is macabre and inventive, but the reader's belief in Richard's predicament is reduced by his leering complicity and self-conscious appeals to his audience. A Garden of Earthly Delights has its narrative so overlaid by patterns and inevitabilities that its account of real life is distorted. Them might have been conceived as an answer to just...

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