When she's good--or WAS good, if you favor her early
career--Jocye Carol
Oates is very good at depicting the insides of victims,
usually women, who
are dominated and hurt by others, and can do nothing about
it. Characters
like Connie in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,"
the stewardess
in "Did You Ever Slip On Red Blood" (both short stories) are
numbed by
media or experience to the point that they are not able to
think and choose
rationally. Her recent novel, _Man Crazy_, though far from
her best, shows
a girl almost reduced to a decaying body before she escapes
imprisonment.
Oates is less good at showing what noir or hard-boiled
fiction excels in,
the psychology of the powerful.
I forget what she said about Cain, but his characters who are
both
victimizers and victims seem "related" (being very careful
here) to Oates'
characters. (Russell Banks and Robert Cormier are two other
authors
working this area.)
Not knowing all of what she said at Boucheron, I would agree
that Oates
can't be characterized as essentially a "genre" writer. But
she has
certainly based much of her work on genre plots, especially
the gothic and
Victorian family sagas. As Roger Kurtz and Fred Willard point
out, the
boundaries are down between fine and popular art these days.
In fact, that
seems to be one of the features of the "postmodern," whether
you're talking
about architecture or fiction. It's an exciting time to write
and read: on
the one hand you have respected "novelists," like Pynchon,
Oates, and
DeLillo who infuse their fiction with so much popular culture
and genre
formula that you wonder whether they will become "dated"; on
the other
hand, there are many writers who begin in "genre," and then
move into
"novels"--Sharlyn McCrumb comes to mind; I even sensed some
restiveness in
Marcia Muller when I last read her. As a genre, hard-boiled
fiction has
moved toward more interest in character psychology, partly
thanks to
Chandler, which is precisely where "fine" fiction has gone in
this century.
One of the reasons we have periodic arguments about whether
someone belongs
"in" or "out" of the "hard-boiled" category is because the
boundaries seem
less fixed; OR, if that threatens your idea of genre too
much, let's say
that more and more authors sneak across the border...and then
sneak back
again.
Having reduced my whole point to an immigration problem, with
authors as
illegal aliens, I will definitely quit.
Bill Hagen
<billha@ionet.net>
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