That Joyce Carol Oates writes with an unmistakably American voice is a truth more or less universally acknowledged. Though the locations of the six stories in "A Sentimental Education," as in her other fiction, are most often the urban and suburban Middle West and East Coast, she is not a regional writer. Her characters speak with the recognizable monotony of those whose inherited accents have been worn down by an indifferent education, mediocre journalism and exposure through radio and television to plastic English. (p. 7)

One of the characteristics of these tired people and their worn-out language is the lack of the resilience necessary to express self-knowledge through humor….

The loss of accent and of wit signals a broader, more inclusive poverty. Figures in the stories are repeatedly saying that they cannot help being the way they are and their actions bear them out. They are, for the most part, creatures without will and therefore with very little of what normally passes for character….

People behave as if in a state of permanent trance….

Their extraordinary and often violent behavior notwithstanding, the characters in these stories are not very interesting. Psychotic patterns flatten and simplify personality, but they do not replace it. One looks in vain for motivation, for reasoning or feeling of even the most rudimentary kind….

What does Joyce Carol Oates make of this material? As in all of her fiction, she presents it with an impressive eye for concrete detail and an ear for the strained, repetitious dialogues that pass for conversation. One of her gifts has always been to write in such a way that, at a certain level, the reader believes totally in the authenticity of her inventions. Her stories—even the very short ones—have bulk….

Miss Oates has sometimes been compared to Flannery O'Connor. If you take away the dialect, the laughter and the redemption, that's right…. In her stories, there is an American profile: design but no beauty, clearsightedness but no vision, energy but no purpose. If such fiction appears to be an exercise in collective self-hatred, she may well have captured the spirit of the land. (p. 21)