gregory_glover's reviews
313 reviews

Will definitely be using this one for a sermon series.  Excellent book for parents (or grandparents) of small children.  Loved the resources and suggestions for further reading.  (Children’s books that address matters of spiritual significance.)

 The book delivers precisely what is promised by the combination of title and subtitle.1 It delivers more than promised in the sense that the biographer and editor, Greg Johnson, is also the author’s friend—and so the letters are warmer and more wide-ranging than might otherwise be expected from coolly business-like correspondence with a biographer. If you come looking for a heavily-edited, thematically-arranged volume, you’ll be disappointed. The edits are limited and judicious, usually in the form of a short introduction to set the context or clarifying comments enclosed in brackets within the text of the letters to identify people, places, events, and the like that would otherwise be confusing to the reader. The latter are especially important given that we have only the letters to the biographer and not the other half of the conversation. Reading the book is very much like overhearing one half of an ongoing phone conversation with Joyce Carol Oates (JCO)—her half—about her spouse, her aging parents, her pets, her colleagues, her work, the publishing world (Vanguard, Random House, Dutton, Norton, Doubleday, Ecco/HarperCollins) and editors, other authors, the theater world, and academic literary circles.

You’ll also be disappointed if you come looking for an unabridged, academic collection or critical edition of the complete correspondence. Ellipses within the letters identify missing portions. You’ll have to make your own index if you want to refer back to JCO’s opinions about Toni Morrison, John Updike, Tom Wolfe, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Truman Capote, Charles Gibson, Janet Malcom, Margaret Atwood, Mike Tyson, Flannery O’Connor, Angelina Jolie, Marilynne Robinson, Saul Bellow, Nabokov, Henry James, Philip Roth, Stephen King, Walter Mosley, P.D. James, Donald Trump, Norman Mailer, Elaine Showalter, Jeanne Halpern, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Wallace Stevens, Oprah Winfrey, Cormac McCarthy, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Harold Bloom and Cornel West (“masters of bloviation,” p. 291).2

Of special interest throughout the book are the many observations JCO makes in the letters about the writing life, especially the challenge of moving back and forth between plays, short stories, novels (shorter and longer, YA and literary fiction), and poetry. She despairs of ever mastering the novella and she frequently mentions the challenge, even agony, of the first draft vs. the relative ease of revising. (For flavor: “Yet, to have the facility of a Mozart, to toss work off without any effort at all, would not be much fun,” p. 58. “I expect to glance into a mirror one day & see a blank space with the notice OUT OF PRINT across it,” p. 291)

I am in the very odd (for me) position of reviewing a book about (by?) an author whose work I have not read, except in the occasional New Yorker or Atlantic essay or article in the New York Review of Books. I’ve never read her novels or seen her plays performed. And, frankly, this is probably not the book that one should choose for an introduction to JCO. Better, or at least more likely to be comprehensive for the periods it covers, is the 1998 biography, also by Greg Johnson (Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates). However, this book of letters and my subsequent research and reading about JCO (especially the November 20, 2023 Profile in the New Yorker by Rachel Aviv, “Joyce Carol Oates’s Relentless, Prolific Search for a Self”) intrigue me enough to pursue reading a few of her novels and short story collections as time permits over the next year or so. If that is the criterion, the book was clearly a success.

Contents

Preface by Greg Johnson
Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates
Part One: 1975-1990
Part Two: 1991-1992
Part Three: 1993-1995
Part Four: 1996-1998
Part Five: 1999-2004
Part Six: 2005-2006

Who Should Read It?

Students of JCO who are trying to obtain contextual and biographical information to understand her oeuvre will be interested in the book, as will any hard core fans of either JCO or Greg Johnson. It is not for people like me who have limited to no prior acquaintance with JCO’s work, as there are likely better entrées to that work and summaries of it.

Princetonians should read the book. In addition to JCO, the university and the town (especially the McCarter Theatre) play a prominent role in the correspondence. As someone who spent significant time at Princeton Theological Seminary during the periods covered by the book (1988-1995), I found it a wonderful trip down memory lane. One letter in particular, dated 8 February 1994, with its brief mention of the weather (“Our weather is unspeakable! More snow! Sleet!”) was especially meaningful. We have photos of that horrific winter in which our first daughter was born a week after the letter was penned. The snow never let up.

Upcoming Events at which JCO will Promote the Book:

1 This book was received via LibraryThing Early Reviewers (LTER), a program by which publishers provide advance copies of books for review (or, as in this case, recently published copies—the book was released on March 5 and I was notified that I had “won” it on February 27; I received and started reading it on March 8). The book arrived complete with a Press Kit from Akashic Books with promotional events with Joyce Carol Oates listed from March 18-May 20. LibraryThing does not dictate the content or tone of any reviews, so long as they abide by the Terms of Use publicly posted on the site. This review is my honest opinion.

2 Cornel West actually appears with an interview/essay in the next book I must review, Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future, Rowman & Littlefield: NY, 2023, edited by George Yancy. 

I would say that this book delivers exactly what the title advertises, only it does not, in a couple of significant ways that center on the meaning of the word “conversations.”1 Provocations might be a better choice of words. The book is an edited series of interviews with key public intellectuals. The interviewer in each instance is deeply sympathetic with the interviewee, so there are no challenges to the respondents’ answers or assertions. This is not a dialogue. There is no “conversation” in the usual sense of the word, as the questions serve to tee up already well-known and well-understood positions by well-known people. All of the essays that I read (or in some cases sampled or skimmed) were also afflicted with the disease of dense, obfuscating academic jargon. As Helen Lewis (The Atlantic) says, “The point of a public intellectual is to make wild arguments with maximum conviction.” …and in this respect the contributors have exceeded my expectations.

I should be more cautious. I am in every way, to use the antiracist language of the book, coded White. As such, silence would in this instance be the better part of valor. The book as much as says so on p. 33, where a question (a component, surely, of any real conversation), a question by a straw man (actually a woman philosopher), a question by a white interlocutor, functions “to privilege whiteness even as it gives the appearance of something ‘progressive.’” She (the questioner) should see what is needed without having to ask the question. She cannot provide what is needed, so the question exhibits white arrogance. And her white power is instantiated precisely in posing the question. In other words, there is no room for conversation. Any effort to respond to such ignorant questions would rob the respondent of what breath they have left, which is better used to scream. That may well be so, given the sorry state of things. I am very well aware that the feelings of outrage and screams about injustice are well founded and fully justified. Racism and its violent effects are very much with us. Perhaps the most vivid, horrific, recent case in point is what happened to Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker in 2023 (“Goon Squad Officer is Sentenced to 20 Years in Mississippi Torture Cases,” New York Times, March 19, 2024. “If What Happened to George Floyd Angered You, This Should Outrage You,” 

Jemar Tisby, PhD).  In such a context, outrage and screaming are more than justified, and the whirlwind we are reaping, especially as it is playing out in our national politics, will also destroy white people.

…but outrage and screaming are not an invitation to conversation. So, it would be inappropriate for me to continue with a full review. It would be a waste of breath—air that can better be used by others. I cannot add to what has been said. Every additional word from me is, at this point, both superfluous and an additional offense. Silence is what is required of me—except as I might wish to join in the screaming—and I’ve met the word count obligation incurred by the receipt of the free book, so I’ll quit now. I may finish the book in small doses, as I find screaming distressing. Which, come to think of it, is probably the point.

1 This book was received via LibraryThing Early Reviewers (LTER), a program by which publishers provide advance copies of books for review (or, as in this case, recently published copies—the book was released on September 23, 2023. I was notified that I had “won” it on January 26; I finally received and started reading it on March 1). Unfortunately, this book arrived as a .pdf with a large watermark in the center of each page. The watermark was a constant distraction (obscuring the words of 4-5 lines of text under it on each page) and the .pdf format made it impossible to change the font size on my e-reader, except by manually resizing each page, then reducing it to regular size to enable a page turn. I’ll not accept another e-book for review; it is not worth the hassle. LibraryThing does not dictate the content or tone of any reviews, so long as they abide by the Terms of Use publicly posted on the site. This review is my honest opinion. 

Excellent introduction to the subject, as so many in this series are.  Nice, classic bibliography of the most significant works in the field.  Simple explanations and examples.

Loved the dialogue and character development.  There were a lot of characters to keep up with, but it mostly flowed.  Plot was slow to get started (the intro only makes sense in retrospect…have to reread it at the end), but it does start to grab you and pull you on to the climactic chapters with a twist or two that are worth the patience.

Challenging is an understatement.  Beautiful, poignant, ugly, graphic, terrible, haunting, brilliant,…..  I have to come back to it.  Maybe it should be required reading for the 4th of July.   (Is “patriotic” too loaded a term for what Hayes is doing?  It is a tortured love of country, for sure.)  I’m sure I didn’t grasp even half of it.  To take the sonnet (?) form for this content is a bold choice, as is the traditional first line index rather than individual titles or even numbers to define discrete poems.  A masterpiece (would Hayes allow the word?) of contemporary poetry and literature more broadly.

A bit too repetitive, sometimes bordering on pedantic, but such an important topic…and mostly well-executed.  A bit too academic?

Incredible poetry tracing a season, a life, eternity in plants and flowers and gardens.  Almost prayers—matins and vespers—almost worship in song.

It builds slowly.  Maybe I should say the weave of the various strands of the narrative slowly tightens into a beautiful tapestry.  I need to sit with it a while before offering a full review, but it made me think the whole journey through.  I would love to discuss this with some other readers at some point to hear what others caught and think of this way of writing memoir.