[The Wheel of Love] has thematic unity: focusing exclusively on the emotional complexity of human relationships, the collection offers a rich—if distressing—view of the mysterious, volatile, and disorienting power of love. But the very obsessiveness of this thematic emphasis may contribute to the reader's disaffection with Oates. The reader is overcome with fatigue, bombarded as he is with repeated instances of unrelieved emotional misery. Moreover, he is likely to lose sight of the well-realized story in the chaff of the less luminous ones.

In this collection sexual love is invariably a compulsive, essentially joyless, terrifying, painful and unwelcome experience. (p. 375)

The Wheel of Love is populated with innumerable men and women who have sealed themselves off from physical and emotional experience. Oates often employs clerics such as Sister Irene of "In the Region of Ice" and Father Rollins of "Shame" to depict the emotional sterility that sometimes accompanies the protective sanctuary of the celibate life…. Other men and women of the volume do not need the garb of the religious life to exclude physicality from life. For example, Pauline of "Bodies," a talented sculptress interested only in "heads," is coolly aloof from "bodies," from the physical and emotional bonds among people, until an emotionally disturbed young man forces her into a relationship by the violent expedient of slashing his throat before her on the street.

Sometimes the fragile shell of immunity from emotional relationships is in danger of cracking. (p. 376)

Clearly, most characters in this volume are too weak to stand the "strain and risk" of love, and even if they can, the momentary highs of sexual ecstasy or felt love are inevitably accompanied by prolonged lows. Either the loved one dies ("The Wheel of Love," "What Is the Connection Between Man and Woman?") and the bereaved husband or wife is inconsolable in his grief, or the lovers seek death to be relieved from the burden and pain of powerful feelings ("Unmailed, Unwritten Letters," "I Was in Love"), or the lovers are punished for their happiness by the resentment of others (the woman's son attempts death in "I Was in Love" after her rendezvous with her lover; the husband in "Convalescing" is involved in a serious auto accident after hearing of his wife's affair). Furthermore, a number of Oatesian characters are so entangled in filial relationships that they are incapable of healthy love relationships outside of the family. Often a child is inhibited by the strength and vibrancy of the parents. (p. 377)

Feeling themselves to be unworthy of love or unable to risk it, or unable to experience it, or unhappy within it, jointly the characters of the collection offer a dismal view of the human being's incapacity to enjoy a healthy and wholesome emotional life. The pervasive low resiliency of the characters may fatigue and depress the reader as well; and from the volume as a whole, one may be left with an overwhelming sense of pessimism about the potentiality for fulfilling human relationships…. [The] thematic unity of the volume invites a faulty generalization which obscures rather than enhances the artistry of the separate stories. Oates is not writing about Human Nature; she is rather fashioning incidents which depict the problems and limitations of individual human beings. She excels in her ability to individuate and to specify; she is less successful when she attempts to draw generalized human types and situations.

The least successful kind of story, in my opinion, is usually unrelieved interior monologue, often in first person, in which an emotionally distraught person dwells obsessively upon his unhappiness. Although the technique is innovative, the cleverness of conception does not compensate for the monotony of content…. The staccato-like report of [the young woman in "Unmailed, Unwritten Letters"] is monotonous and annoying. I suppose it is psychologically valid that she attempts to contain her near-hysteria within the short sentences of her exhaustively thorough confession, but the story does not build in dramatic intensity through the bombardment of every detail of action and feeling. (pp. 377-79)

"I Was in Love," is a tedious account of the state of high tension, guilt, and suppressed hysteria of a woman who is having an adulterous affair…. The message that love is burdensome, inconvenient, and disruptive is blatantly clear; but Oates fails to place this observation within a larger context, fails to raise our perception above this hysterical woman's complaint. Should one accept this woman's misery as the inevitable consequence of love, or does Oates mean to isolate specific traits of this woman which create her suffering? Oates has failed to give her story a meaningful shape. Like the woman herself, the reader achieves no perspective on her situation; there's no illumination, no epiphany, no climax beyond the contrived death of her son.

Some stories fail for just the opposite reason: the specific situation rendered fails to support the ponderous generalization affixed to it. Such a story is "What Is the Connection Between Men and Women?"… Again Oates employs an unconventional technique and again it fails to redeem the content…. At the alleged moment of illumination, all remains dark. What is the connection between men and women? Surely the story doesn't show or tell. (pp. 379-80)

Paradoxically, Oates is at her best when she is most conventional, when she relies on her impressive skill as an omniscient third-person narrator who selects and refines details in such a way that a story is rendered with dramatic immediacy and intensity. Oates's most successful vantage point is at a distance from her characters where she dispassionately sketches with deft strokes their interior and exterior lives, places them in vividly specific contexts, and clinically records the mounting tension and conflicts of the story. Two of the most memorable stories of this collection, "In the Region of Ice" and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," display Oates's scalpel-like control of her metier. Both stories begin with a sketch of the central character which does not so much describe the woman as it suggests through a few descriptive details qualities of disposition which will function importantly in the story: the imposing illusion of intelligence, seriousness, and restraint of Sister Irene; the shallow, adolescent narcissism of Connie. (p. 380)

["Where Are You Going"] is enriched by the very ordinariness of Connie and her friends and their dreamy infatuation with the sleazy and experimental no man's land of adolescence. Connie's encounter with Arnold Friend is not just a unique instance of how one girl's experimental flirtation jettisons her too rapidly into the world of experience, not just one girl's perception of the deception of appearances and the terrible reality of evil, but a particularly vivid instance of a universal experience: the loss of innocence. (p. 381)

What makes "In the Region of Ice" and "Where Are You Going" so memorable is not only the precise rendering of the central character's evolving response to the male intruder in her world, but also the richness and clarity of thematic statement in each story. Unlike the lesser stories—where the reader is frequently unable to rise above the tortuous responses of the characters themselves—"In the Region of Ice" and "Where Are You Going" do give the reader perspective on the protagonists' predicaments. Sister Irene is one of many frigid, inhibited women in Oates's fiction, but unlike many of them, she is portrayed as a person at least partially responsible for her own limitations. (p. 382)

Similarly, "Where Are You Going" is more than a tale of the inevitable seduction of a young girl like Connie. Oates captures so well the vacuousness, cheapness, and narcissism of life for Connie and her friends who have nothing better to do than to stroll up and down a shopping center plaza looking for excitement. That this fictional scene is in fact a mirror-image of reality for many young teenagers does not mean that the adolescent world is inevitably as Oates creates it. (p. 383)

Oates has written some stories where the reader cannot rise above the emotional duress of the characters, stories, often in first person, of unrelieved and tedious delineation of misery better told to a psychiatrist than to the reader. Occasionally Oates makes first-person narration work. She even experiments successfully with second-person; "You" is an effectively crafted account of a daughter's obsession with "You," her mother. But she is more often successful with the built-in restraints of third-person narration. This angle of vision allows her to set up character and scene dispassionately. The carefully chosen details, the directly rendered action, the heightening tension, and the coolly incisive authorial descriptions of feelings replace the unrelieved harangue of an emotionally distraught character and contribute to a sense of distance and perspective. (pp. 383-84)