A Time for Silence

...Matter and Energy," in which Miss Oates ineptly tries to render the immediate chaos of random thought, leads me to suspect she had been reading Nathalie Sarraute, too literally, just before sitting down to write...

...Although the stories, taken together, are meant to show the multiple faces and forms of love--female, sexual, familial--the only view Miss Oates projects with conviction is that of love as a disease, an affliction, an uncontrollable psychic rash...

...They have drenched the reader in a loquacious, unstinting flood of perceptively imagined and observed detail, credible dialogue, and rather fussy analyses of sensibility, all of it plotted toward the inevitable violence that has become the Oates trademark...

...He hated her for the selfishness of her death and for her having eclipsed him forever...

...At other times, abandoning the ground of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, she spells things out too teacherishly: The professor in "The Wheel of Love," leaving the little dinner party, suddenly "knew what he had wanted to tell them . . . he was not mourning Nadia's death but his own...

...In Dostoevsky and Celine, in the aging Mark Twain, the corrosive intensity of pessimistic contempt is given a depth of persuasion, even dignity, by a resonant force of experience and judgment, of a once robust compassion that was irrevocably betrayed...

...In Them, for which she won the 1970 National Book Award, she moved like the native she is not through lower-class Detroit in times of depression and war...

...In her earlier books, Miss Oates' America was a bleak and inescapable purgatory of illiterate and lonely farmers, brutal salesmen, and proletarian near-beasts inflicting their fanged, inarticulate savagery on children, parents, sisters, brothers--the closer the blood-ties, the more bloody the conflict...

...in A Garden of Earthly Delights, so completely apart in time, place and quality from her own experience, she was remarkably successful at envisioning and dissimulating the inchoate poverty of migrant fruit-pickers in the South...

...And in her stories the affliction called love is never cured by violence, but merely brought to a halt by its gory finality...

...Since the first of her novels, beautifully titled A Garden of Earthly Delights, brought her the immoderate praise now almost automatically bestowed on everything she publishes, her words have poured forth like tropical rain...

...But, in something of a paradox, if ever a writer seemed in therapeutic need of a spell of silence (which is clearly not about to happen), Miss Oates is the one...

...Meanwhile, the story becomes less a matter of profundity and recognition than an exercise in manipulative detachment...

...Miss Oates, on the other hand, far less convincingly relies on acts of melodramatic violence to support her vision of the follies of love...

...The style is not only more asphyxiating than absorbing, but unintentionally funny...

...In the title story, a professor whose wife has recently committed suicide tries, and fails, to sort out his sorrow, loathing and guilt toward the dead woman in the course of an awkward dinner with a former student...

...Brutal men rape innocent girls, guns kill, cars crush their occupants, and the blood runs thick in the riotous wake of love's worst ignorance and deceptions...

...Aside from such incidental lapses in technique and discretion, however, what is both interesting and disturbing about Miss Oates' new book is a quality of mind and emotion--one I have always felt to be present in her work, but that asserts itself more nakedly and strongly here than in anything she has written previously...

...Yet for all the richness of insight and description that one discerns in Miss Oates' incredibly sustained productivity, I must say that the final effect on me has often been exhaustion...

...I see myself with books, an old, wrinkled, soft paper bag that must have . . . my gym clothes in it, my soiled gym clothes . . . and a towel" (the ellipses are in the text...

...Her more recent work has pesented an abundance of fraudulent, smelly college professors and their ineffectually desperate wives...

...The strain to be different is so obtrusive that the impression is one of a mediocre magician who has unwittingly let the audience see how he does his tricks...

...A number of the tales have to do with unsettled and eccentric children who are committed to mental hospitals by cruelly insensate parents...

...I Was in Love" portrays an uneasily adulterous woman who kills herself and her young son by abandoning control of her automobile...

...But even as I read through her new book of stories, The Wheel of Love (Vanguard, 440 pp., $6.95), I often felt as though I were the captive audience of an intelligent and articulate but dementedly garrulous woman who is terrified above all of silence...

...In 1970, it is hard to take seriously a story that begins "I am coming home from school...

...Writers & Writing A TIME FOR SILENCE BY PEARL K. BELL At 32, Joyce Carol Oates has produced four long novels, three short-story collections, two not-so-slim volumes of poetry and, at latest clocking, two full-length plays...

...In fact, love in her hands becomes a universal form of self-ordained depravity, often obsessive and perverse, an involuntary act of enslaving self-condemnation...

...But a brilliant, mad Jewish student forces her into a dismaying act of compassion...

...Before the blows descend and the bones crush, though, Miss Oates can make superb use of her in-contestably fecund talent...

...In the past I have attributed this to the excessive length of her novels...

...That would be the only interesting fact about him, and how could he ever rise above it by anything in his own life...

...The nun of "In the Region of Ice," a coldly competent teacher of Shakespeare at a large Catholic university, has long been arrogantly certain that her religious habit and teaching skill can preserve forever the distance she must maintain between herself and the messily demanding arena of emotional commitment and human turbulence...

...With the skill of a master ventriloquist, Miss Oates was able to slip easily into worlds of remote experience she could never have known with the authoritative familiarity she brought to their telling...

...Somewhere in the awesome literary profusion of this extraordinary young woman there is a brightly assured voice worth attending to...

...of middle-class families nailed to a cross of mute resentment...

...Now, this bleak and arid view of the way love works needs to be earned if it is to be believed...

...He would always be pointed out as the man whose wife had killed herself...

...For silence might enforce a measure of contemplation that could lead to a skepticism about the tricks she uses to tell her stories, and even about the fundamental significance of the stories themselves...

...In some of the stories in this volume--particularly the ambitious "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again"--Miss Oates becomes too self-consciously "experimental," unwisely rejecting the straightforward realism she ordinarily favors...

...As the latest title suggests (the phrase "the wheel of love" is from a poem by Stanley Kunitz that says a good deal more about love than Miss Oates has yet learned), each of the stories is concerned with some form, usually eccentric or shockingly violent, that circumstance or character can impose on the nature and stress of love...

...She can occupy and illuminate, with immense conviction and power, one quintessential American landscape, wintry and full of loneliness, used cars, cheap boardinghouses, peeling paint, semieducated yearners, and third-rate academics...

...But when she wrenches this poignant familiarity into the violent extremes of melodrama, Joyce Carol Oates willfully renders least credible what in fact she understands best...