abstractions of contemplation, revelation, the meaning of life, beginning life over again; on the other, the tangibility of the Detroit House of Correction and an English class at Baldwin Country Day School. (pp. 213-14)

The "notes for an essay" are presented in twelve divisions marked with Roman numerals. At first glance, one surmises from the form that this is the work of a careful student, arranging material in an orderly fashion … for the purpose of organizing experience into a coherent system. Such an assumption, however, is erroneous, for the divisions do not constitute a topical outline; neither are they chronological. Instead, they are repetitive, disjointed, and dispersive—in other words, indicative of the state of mind of the sixteen-year-old protagonist, confused, questioning, attempting to make sense of the senseless, to impose order upon chaos. (p. 214)

Three divisions are labeled "Events"—the first, the seventh, and the twelfth. Hence the story begins, centers, and ends in recollected action; and action at least is relatively unequivocal, however ambiguous the motives behind the action….

Events, Characters, and Places are the focal points of her outline, but there is no intrinsic order to the arrangement of points; it is random, apparently unpurposeful. What knits the scraps of information together into a movingly effective totality is not the protagonist's pathetic effort to establish meaningful continuity, but the artist's skillful interweaving of motifs and verbal echoes.

Basic to the ultimate unity of the story is a pattern of contrasts. The title and the headnote suggest this contrapuntal interplay; the story elaborates upon the suggestion. Bloomfield Hills is contrasted with inner-city Detroit, the girl's mother with the prostitute Clarita, the girl's father with the procurer-addict Simon. The differences are vast—and yet in each case the contrast is intensified by a curious and significant identity. But most important is the duality of the girl herself.

The pattern of contrasts is established by unlike settings. Bloomfield Hills is an exclusive suburb with "monumental houses."… Detroit, on the other hand, is a world that is "falling out the bottom."… (p. 215)

Bloomfield Hills and Detroit, different as they are, are really two sides of one coin, a coin of insecurity and potential violence.

The mother-Clarita contrast also fits this pattern. Whereas the mother is a "lady [with] hair like blown-up gold … hair and fingers and body of inestimable grace," Clarita is a "woman" with "hair long and falling into strands, not recently washed."… The expensive clothing which the girl's mother wears—coat, boots, gloves, a fur hat—provides protection against the cold of the Michigan winter and, symbolically, against the encroachment of the ugly in life. Clarita, in contrast, wears jeans, a sweater, "unwashed underclothes, or no underclothes,"… and there is no protection for this woman whose face is exhausted, over-wrought, from her experiences as a prostitute since the age of thirteen. (p. 217)

Despite their differences, however, the mother and the prostitute are akin. Both are puzzled by the girl…. Neither woman appreciates the younger girl's frustration; neither can answer the questions raised by her actions. And if Clarita is like the mother in her inability to understand the girl, the two are also similar in the inadequacy of what they do offer to her. (p. 218)

Of particular significance is the likelihood that the girl subconsciously considers both her mother and Clarita to be her rivals…. In this context the squirrel [killed by her mother's car] may be representative of the girl (note the rhyme) since the girl on more than one occasion mentions the chattering of her teeth and describes herself as wearing a close-fitted coat with a fur collar; thus she may see herself as being destroyed in the rivalry with the more powerful older woman. The girl, therefore, wants to hurt her mother…. Clarita, too, must be a kind of rival to the girl, though a less formidable one. When the prostitute takes the girl into her apartment above a restaurant, Simon is the older woman's lover, but in a short time Simon has become the girl's lover—whether also or instead is not made clear. The girl supposes that it is Simon who turned her in to the police when he grew tired of her; she makes no conscious connection between her arrest and Clarita's saying "mournfully to me Honey somebody is going to turn you out let me give you warning."… Perhaps there is no connection; perhaps, however, her never knowing for sure that her arrest was Simon's doing is suggestive of a refusal on her part to admit another defeat at the hands of a competitor. (pp. 218-19)

Simon is a drifter, a parasite who lives off women. He sleeps mornings and afternoons, coming alive at night and only then with the stimulation of a pill or a cigarette…. The betrayal [of Clarita] is instigated by Simon, but the girl shares in it; her ambivalent feelings of guilt and desire are indicative of her sense of having betrayed Clarita, the mother who saved her from the street, and her sense of having achieved some sort of victory in capturing Simon-father, however briefly, for herself.

So Simon is a surrogate father whose whole attention the girl has managed to attain. (pp. 219-20)

The contrapuntal pattern, omnipresent in the story, is ultimately traceable to the dichotomy within the girl herself. She has a desperate need for love, security, self-approbation. Her insecurity is revealed, for example, in the variety of substantives she uses to refer to herself. She never mentions her name….

Moreover, she frequently insists that she makes her own decisions, and yet she knows she does not…. (p. 221)

Typical of nearly every division of the notes is an ambivalence, revealed partially through the device of interrogatives. Of herself she has little certain knowledge, only that which can be measured empirically—her age; her height…. But value judgments she cannot make…. (p. 222)

Pink is used to characterize the culture of Bloomfield Hills…. Pink, a color traditionally associated with an innocent baby girl, is also a tainted white and a diluted red, neither pure nor passionate; it is an appropriate color for the "innocently experienced" protagonist and her habitat.

The girl's association of herself and the squirrel, discussed above in another context, is an example of her use of animal imagery in descriptions of characters, suggestive of inability to perceive herself or anyone else as distinctly human. (pp. 222-23)

Religious imagery, too, colors the story, but without evidence of serious commitment on the girl's part. The title and the headnote suggest contemplation, revelation, and rebirth…. (p. 223)

The story has made clear that Sioux Drive has not in the past provided a sense of security and self-worth for the girl, and it seems unlikely that it will begin to do so now. The "beginning again" of the title, as well as the "happy ending" of the headnote, is really a return to a place that before had failed her miserably…. [For] the present, though, it offers at least a pretense of safety. Repeatedly the girl acknowledges her retreat into security, however tenuous it may prove….

This incredibly concentrated story is developed in such a way that structure, imagery, motifs, verbal echoes work together to create for the reader the actual experience of the experiencing mind of the protagonist. (p. 224)

Sue Simpson Park, "A Study In Counterpoint: Joyce Carol Oates's 'How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again'," in Modern Fiction Studies (© copyright 1976, by Purdue Research Foundation, West Lafayette, Indiana), Summer, 1976, pp. 213-24.

Miss Oates' third novel—Expensive People (1968)—was a radical departure from the social milieu and gritty realities of her first books. By that I mean, the world of Richard Everett [the narrator] is as much a "fiction" as the fiction he self-consciously tries to write. The result is a parody of the reflexive mode, a book about the making of such books. It is also a Nabokovian romp in the art-and-craft of confessional narration…. As in all novels built upon the structural principle of Chinese boxes, the inter-locking frames are apparently endless. Richard Everett's highly personal reading of "The Molesters" (a story Miss Oates originally published in The Quarterly Review of Literature) reduces it to the level of biographical allegory; Miss Oates' comments about Expensive People are an exercise in a similar brand of impressionism. Both imply partial truths, but when "authors" multiply dizzyingly, readers quickly learn the virtues of skepticism. (p. 89)

Ironies generate from the considerable gaps between [Richard Everett's] narrative intention and its fictive result. Put another way: Richard's account of suburban malaise is an exercise in simultaneously calling tensions into existence and then declaring them inoperative. (p. 90)

Expensive People is more a study in comic nihilism, in suburban emptiness, than it is a seriously rendered psychodrama…. Imitation is, indeed, the sincerest form of flattery; parodic echoes—and particularly those which raise the zany to another power—are a very different matter. Like the Ambrose of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Richard wears his writer's block on his sleeve. Classical models, earnest advice from how-to-do-it pulps like Amateur Penman, Franklinesque lists about what lies in store, all serve to take readers behind the memoir's "plot line" to the comic agonies of its creation.

Yet the gulf between fiction and Reality, between the illusion that is Art and the felt pain that is Life, has its darker, more serious, side. The mobility made possible by affluence becomes as suspect as the itch to exchange one version of suburban life for another. Moreover, Oates is not totally convinced that romantic fulfillments lie just over the next concrete horizon. If Thomas Wolfe could wax lyrical in attempting to prove that You Can't Go Home Again, Oates seems just as determined to suggest (albeit, playfully) that in contemporary America one can never leave…. (pp. 92-3)

[Illusion] and reality are so ineluctably intertwined, the world of Expensive People so reflexively absurd, that confusion threatens to emerge as the only norm possible…. The generalization spreads across Miss Oates' canon. All her children are cut from the same bolt of lava-like cloth; Richard Everett is simply more articulate than those who seethe in a befuddled silence. But, ironically enough, the compulsive attempts to tell his story (however representative it might be as archetype) are diminished by the painstaking—and darkly comic—attention to its own self-consciousness. The result is a fiction which "tells," rather than shows, its intensity. Which is to say, a playful wit keeps poking through the fabric of Richard's confessional memoir. Genuine turmoil is seldom this calculated. (pp. 95-6)

Much of the literary humor in Expensive People consists of allusions wrinkled, almost unnoticed, through the novel's surface…. [The] "expensive people" share a passion for with-it intellectuality. Their children wrestle with admissions tests, IQ scores and the competitive, cut-throat style of the Johns Behemoth School; their parents sit through droning lectures. (p. 97)

[The] dream maketh villains of us all. Child-molesters (like child murderers) surround themselves with high-brow rhetoric and the freighting of twice-told ideas. Richard's existential act [his mother's murder] … brings matricide and his memoir into bold, symmetrical relief…. As Nadia's notebook knew all along:

… the climax will be the death of X, but one must get past. The trouble is getting there … and getting past. As in any first-person narrative there can be a lot of freedom….

Expensive People "got there" all right; getting past, however, would happen later, in novels which played Oatesian emotions closer to the non-reflexive bone. (pp. 102-03)

Sanford Pinsker, "Suburban Molesters: Joyce Carol Oates' 'Expensive People'," in The Midwest Quarterly (copyright, 1977, by The Midwest Quarterly, Kansas State College of Pittsburg), Autumn, 1977, pp. 89-103.

Fifteen-year-old Connie's acquiescence to Arnold Friend's threat-ridden seduction is an appropriate finale to Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" in a narrative which, upon careful analysis, suggests existential allegory. Many critics have classified Oates's work as realistic or naturalistic, whereas Samuel J. Pickering categorizes her short stories as subjective romanticism to a fault [see CLC, Vol. 6]. Most, however, agree she is writing in the tradition of Dreiser, Faulkner, and O'Connor, but few have acknowledged the allegorical nature of her work. Veiling the intent of "Where Are You Going …" in realistic detail, Oates sets up the framework of a religious allegory—the seduction of Eve—and with it renders a contemporary existential initiation theme—that of a young person coming to grips with externally determined fate. (p. 200)

From the outset of the narrative, members of Connie's family recognize their powerlessness and thus their difference from her. Her mother and sister are not attractive, so they do not really count; and her father, who spends most of his time at work, is weak…. Thus, in refusing to attend a family picnic, Connie is rejecting not only her family's company, but the settled order of their existence—in which recognition of "excluded alternatives" is tantamount to acceptance of their lives.

The popular music which permeates "Where Are You Going …" is at the same time the narrative's zeitgeist and leitmotiv, serving as the former in order to maintain plausible realism, and the latter to establish allegorical significance. The recurring music then, while ostensibly innocuous realistic detail, is in fact, the vehicle of Connie's seduction and because of its intangibility, not immediately recognizable as such. Attesting to the significance of the zeitgeist in this narrative, "Where Are You Going …" is dedicated to Bob Dylan, who contributed to making music almost religious in dimension among the youth. It is music—instead of an apple—which lures Connie, quickens her heartbeat; and popular lyrics which constitute Friend's conversation and cadence—his promises, threats, and the careless confidence with which he seduces her. (pp. 200-01)

Oates employs musical metaphor in her description of Friend. "He spoke in a simple lilting voice, exactly as if he were reciting the words to a song."… Intrinsic to Friend's function is the fact that he himself is a record. While waiting for Connie to accept his ride offer, "he began to mark time with the music from Ellie's radio."… Even their union is presaged by the sexually pointed observation of Connie listening "to the music from her radio and the boy's blend together."…

The images which overtly suggest religious allegory while more subtly supporting the existential theme, are interspersed throughout the work. When Connie and her girl friend first enter the local "hang-out" where the girls and boys meet, they feel "as if they were entering a sacred building" where background music seems like that of a "church service."… The day of the cook-out, which is significant both because it is the day of her defiance of her parents and the day of her capitulation to Friend, is a Sunday. (p. 201)

Friend is a strange syncretism of O'Connor's Bible-pedaling Manley Pointer in manner, and Satan in appearance. When Connie first observes Friend, she notices his "shaggy black hair," his "jalopy painted gold," and his broad grin. As the narrative progresses, his features appear more ominous, his hair like a wig, his slitted eyes "like chips of broken glass" with "thick black tarlike" lashes when not covered by mirrored, but masking sunglasses; and he looks older. Like Milton's Satan "crested aloft and Carbuncle his Eyes with burnished Neck of verdant Gold, erect," Friend posited atop his golden jalopy, has a muscular neck which suggests the reptilian, as does the fact that he "slid" rather than stepped out of the car. His feet resemble the devil's cloven hooves: "One of his boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn't in it."… (pp. 201-02)

Friend's mesmeric influence on Connie further supports my contention that he represents a superhuman force. "Don't you know who I am?"… he asks in an eery fashion, as if she had encountered him before, as one does evil. She is unable to make a telephone call for help because he is watching her; she bumps against a piece of furniture in a familiar room; and when he commands her to do what would otherwise seem an irrational act, to place her hand on her heart to understand its flaccidity, she readily obeys. His directives culminate when he convinces her, "What else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in."…

The recurring use of a twentieth-century symbol of irony—the false smile—further veils the existential meaning in realistic narrative. Over the student drive-in hangs a "revolving figure of a grinning boy holding a hamburger aloft."… And Friend intersperses smiles with threats."…

In the end, Oates makes it clear that Connie, in capitulating to Friend, is not simply surrendering her virginal innocence, but bowing to absolute forces which her youthful coquetry cannot direct—absolute forces over which she has no control. At this point she thinks for the first time in her life that her heart "was nothing that was hers … but just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn't really hers either."…

In the seduction which Friend engineers, Connie is merely the personification of the female he wishes to dominate, to be taller than, to despoil. The phrases he delivers from his musical repertoire are not even tailored to Connie: "'My sweet little blue-eyed girl' he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes."… (p. 202)

In the presentation of this complex narrative, the major characters represent two distinct personifications in the dual levels of the allegory. It is apparent that Friend represents the devil who tempts the chaste yet morally vacuous girl-victim. Yet upon closer analysis, it appears that Connie takes the active part as Everyman experiencing the inevitable realization of her insignificance and powerlessness while Friend, who personifies the Erinyes, is merely the catalyst.

Although Oates uses the trappings of a realist to craft plausible characters—a dreamy teenaged girl, a hypnotic Manson-like man—and renders a facsimile of awkward adolescent behavior and speech, with contemporary youth's devotion to popular music as a convincing zeitgeist, this must not obscure her design. She presents an allegory which applies existential initiation rites to the Biblical seduction myth to represent Everyman's transition from the illusion of free will to the realization of externally determined fate. (pp. 202-03)

Marie Mitchell Olesen Urbanski, "Existential Allegory: Joyce Carol Oates 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'" in Studies in Short Fiction (copyright 1978 by Newberry College), Spring, 1978, pp. 200-03.

The solemn domestic absorption of many of Joyce Carol Oates's stories seems narcissistic,… though this prolific and highly acclaimed author often writes well and, of course, her concerns are … obviously up-to-date: the imposition and effects of sex-roles, especially in marriage; the plight of the educated, jobless wife; adultry-drift; and so on. Half of the 15 stories in [Crossing the Border] form a fragmented novel about a couple who have left the States for Canada, so that Evan, a research scientist, can escape doing morally repugnant work in 'defence biology'. His wife Renée is increasingly restless, and her characteristically frantic moves towards and away from an affair with a horrifically self-satisfied married poet are closely described.

Several of the stories are effectively bizarre—one about a mental defective who haunts Renée, for example (though I couldn't help thinking how much more Ian McEwan, say, would have made of this)…. To often, though, the writing is slackly uncommunicative. Take, for example, this corny piece of literary self-reference of Renée's:

Our lives are narrative; they are experienced in the flesh … but they are recollected as poems, lyrics, condensed, illuminated by a few precise images. It would be dramatic of me to say that our relationship with Blaine ended at that moment …

Well, does she mean narratives, or does she mean lyrics? Or does she—as 'dramatic' suggests—mean plays? She couldn't care less, of course: the metaphors are so tired that there's nothing to choose between them. And this tendency to let a group of random shots do service for one on target is symptomatic. (p. 27)

Jeremy Treglown, in New Statesman (© 1978 the Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), July 7, 1978.

[In Crossing the Border] Joyce Carol Oates has produced another fine set of tales—witty, wily and variegated. The theme yet again is one of "marriages and infidelities"; the scene that of her home town (Windsor, Ontario) on the United States-Canada Border…. At this political junction (between Windsor and Detroit, Lake Erie and Lake Huron) she plots a series of emotional junctures that also evoke "natural borders". At all such borders travellers, she insists, must confront the abrupt and unexpected challenge of alien "customs".

The stories are linked not only by theme and setting, though, but by the marital rift of an American couple…. The woof of their commonplace marital disaffection, adultery and disillusion, threading in and out of alternate stories, binds and packages the volume….

For her central object of concern is the domestic male within marriage. Can the male of the species survive marriage? Can his boyish, exuberant, insecure and romantic self harden sufficiently to bolster and prop the marriage or must it inevitably shatter and dissipate itself in endless impotent and shallow flirtations? Must the female always be so triumphantly and passionately unhappy? Must the men, in dreary self-preservation, always end by begging for forgiveness and support from a woman's strength? In middle age must they turn so scathingly bitter? Are they ever truly capable of loving anyone?…

It is a terrible indictment. The heroic task, then, is to preserve the frail compact of marriage. The borders of that compact are defined by several outsiders—an importunate homosexual, a friendly simpleton, a potential lover—who intrude on the married nest. The need is to obviate the danger, to deflect it, to decamp if necessary, to isolate the marriage itself. "All marriages", the lover's voice concludes (amid a buzz of conflicting ironies), are "workable in ways that can't be described". But should the marriage fail, it is the males, exiled from domesticity, who are lost in a limbo: of common rooms, if lucky; if not so lucky, in the stale air of post offices with ex-lawyers, ex-graduates, ex-executives, ex-citizens (black and white), sorting out "acres of mail, mountains of mail, from one shadow to another", in that final haven of peace and communal silence.

Harold Beaver, "Heroes of Marriage," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1978; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), July 14, 1978, p. 789.

["Son of the Morning"] is a hugely ambitious novel. Clearly well-researched, it could serve as a basis for the sociological study of the theory and practice of Pentecostal religion. It explores the phenomenon of "revelation" and mystical experience with an extraordinary imaginative thrust. It poses, without answering, questions about the nature of Christ, the church as an institution, and whether there is God or only the desire for God, leading to madness; and whether He is a God of Salvation or a vast metaphysical appetite for souls, a destroyer….

[The] author enters into the heightened feelings and experiences of nearly every character in the large cast—except God's. But the girl's memories of the rape, Nathan's relationship with God, his grandmother's supernatural adoration of him as a child, his grandfather's desperate stoicism, the hysterical fervor of the prayer meetings, the physical hardware of everyone's ordinary life, are all felt and described with a sustained virtuosity. The language, fittingly enough, is biblical, apocalyptic, intense. For me the book is a little too long: Compression is not high on the author's list of priorities.

The sharp edge of irony, however, tempers the intensity when the venality or hypocrisy of the "normally" religious is revealed, without comment….

Echoing Nathan's hunger for God, and God's for him, there is throughout the novel a harping on the huge, crude hungriness of nature, the vicious circle of hunter and hunted….

There is a hungriness in the writing of Joyce Carol Oates, too: an appetite for huge themes and violent emotions, in seeming tension with her analytical, academic side. It makes for great vitality; it also breeds a slight resistance in the reader, as does her extraordinary fluency and productivity. Can so regular a flow of novels, stories, poetry and criticism all be in the first class? Of course they can. Costiveness is not necessarily a literary virtue. The problem for the contemporary reader, however, is that it is hard to see the trees for the forest. We cannot know whether it is her whole oeuvre that will seem the sum of her achievement in the eyes of our grandchildren, or whether one novel, say, will survive as a classic, a Great American Novel, and the rest be unread except by thesis writers. It doesn't matter; "Son of the Morning" is a rich dish that will be devoured by the hungry faithful.

Victoria Glendinning, "In Touch with God," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1978 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), August 13, 1978, p. 10.

Ms. Oates's [Night Side] is … more than a grab-bag. All 18 tales are concerned with borderline reality, what the author has called "that mysterious realm of the paranormal." [It] differs considerably from her early novels in that almost all the violence is mental rather than actual…. [These] are interior tales—stories of individuals haunted by their own uneasinesses and anxieties. What is striking is how Ms. Oates manages to reconstruct the dreams and nightmares which afflict us all…. (p. 601)

Robert Phillips, in Commonweal (copyright © 1978 Commonweal Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of Commonweal Publishing Co., Inc.), September 15, 1978.