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Synopsis:
Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling author of Blonde
A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother.” In the collection’s longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide.
In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.
Review:
Zero-Sum: Stories is the newest collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates. She is getting close to publishing fifty short story collections, and this really shows the two main types of stories that she writes: stories about the interior life that dwell deep into the psyche of the main characters and the stories that are just creepy and strange, filled with killers, predators, and danger. I find that the stories driving with characters who are being introspective on topics like suicide and motherhood, do not keep me as interested as the stories that are weird and dangerous. Fortunately for Zero-Sum, this collection has both.
Joyce Carol Oates has has a long career of telling stories in her own way. She also tells stories about others in her own way. Blonde is her famous book based on Marilyn Monroe, but this is not her only writing based on famous people and events. My Sister, My Love is based on the JonBenet Ramsey case. Black Water is based on Ted Kennedy and the Chappaquiddick incident. Wild Nights! is a story collection based on the final days of five famous authors. Many of her novels are based on celebrities, unsolved crimes, and serial killers. With this knowledge in the back of my head, I was reading the longest story in the collection, “The Suicide”. This is the story about an award-winning author who is planning to kill himself but cannot get the narrative of his suicide right so he keeps rewriting the story. I I could not stop thinking that this story is based on David Foster Wallace. In this story, as well as some of her others, like “The Baby-Monitor” and “The Cold”, Oates dives deep into her characters, making us understand that there is always so much more below the surface that we should not be quick to judge people, and sometimes helping them is beyond our capacities. These stories really are character studies, and there is not always a good resolution to the events.
My favorite stories by Joyce Carol Oates are her most absurd ones. I know that she can really explain suicide and post-partum feelings, but these stories are not nearly as interesting to me as stories like “Monstersister” about a girl starts growing something weird on the back of her head, and this growth begins to take over her life, and “Mr. Stickum” about a group of girls who are going to take revenge on someone from the neighborhood whom they think is a sexual predator. These stories of absurdity and crime are much of the reason why I really read Joyce Carol Oates. She does really well with the serious stories, but the not-so-serious stories are the ones that really grab my attention.
Oates is now 85 years old and has published 160 books. For her to continue to write and publish so many novels and stories is remarkable, and we need to keep reading her books. Zero-Sum is not my favorite collection by her, but there are some really good stories in the mix. For someone who has written so much, it is still a wonder that I get excited to see what she is going to write next.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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