Where She's Going, Where She's Been?
8 min read
Joyce Carol Oates | The Frenzy | Random House | June 2026 | 336 pages
A sense of inevitability afflicts forty-six-year-old Matthew Cassidy, a married man carrying on an affair with a woman in Joyce Carol Oates's short story "The Frenzy". He's not so much worried about 'if' his wife will find out about the affair, but when. Matthew has in fact already rented a condo in anticipation of the affair being discovered and him being kicked out of his home. His paramour, Brianna, seated beside him in his Subaru on their way to their hotel room, is silent—having requested that they not talk during the drive. Her thumbs dance frantically over her iPhone screen, texting someone and keeping her phone out of the view of Matthew. The silence is giving Matthew time to contemplate the fallout from when this all blows up in his face, he really hopes it isn't until after Brianna's upcoming birthday—illogically rationalizing that an affair with a twenty-year-old woman is less reprehensible than one with a nineteen-year-old girl. And then of course there will be no escaping the revulsion of it being with his neighbor's daughter.
The Frenzy is Joyce Carol Oates's latest short story collection, adding to her already enormous oeuvre that presents a unique problem for critics reviewing her—how does one get through her backlist? The 'Also by Joyce Carol Oates' at the front of the book goes on for two-and-a-half pages, and that's just the short story collections. The frequency at which her new books arrive makes reading her backlist a moving target; she writes books faster than we can read them. Oates is often asked about the secrets to her productivity in interviews. In a 2008 interview with Robert L. Pincus in the San Diego Union-Tribune Oates summed it up: "I love to write." Her first short story collection, By the North Gate, came out in 1963 and The Frenzy is her forty-eighth collection. Fox (2025) was her sixty-fifth novel (including the novels written under her pen names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly). She's been bestowed with numerous awards, however when it comes to the Pulitzer she's always the bridesmaid and never the bride. Oates's books have been Pulitzer finalists five times, including her novel Blonde that had the misfortune of being published in 2000—the same year as Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay which took home the chalice that year. At eighty-seven years old, Oates shows no signs of slowing down; the stories in The Frenzy have the same energy and verve as her stories from decades ago.
Oates's writing style often excises conjunctions, replacing them with commas and giving her sentences a choppiness and urgent clarity: "The headstrong girl has become docile, unresisting." "Feminists meaning to be optimistic, encouraging." "Arlette remained close, loyal." She doesn't limit this technique to just adjectives: "to lift her mother from the lethargy of despair into which otherwise her mother would sink, drown." Like a lot of authors, Oates has a Ten Rules of Writing list, the first of which is "Write your heart out." Also like a lot of authors she includes rules that baffle or confound: "When in doubt how to end a chapter, bring in a man with a gun. (This is Raymond Chandler's advice, not mine. I would not try this.)" It makes one wonder if her tenth rule, which is, again, "Write your heart out" is there for emphasis or just cattiness. She is still as versatile and experimental as ever—we get social realism here (she's still getting stories out of upstate New York farmhouses) and she still retains the title of Dark Lady of American Letters for her surrealism (first bestowed by Joe David Bellamy in a February 1972 Atlantic article). The claim by some critics that her immense output is seen as lack of editing is absurd, one is unlikely to ever find a superfluous word in any of Oates's stories.
Illness (and sometimes hypochondria) is a theme that runs through many of Oates's stories; here she has a robustly healthy middle-aged man who ignores symptoms and then "had no idea it was dying that swept through him, like a child running through a house switching off lights." The second story in this collection, "The Fear", springs from the jealousy that a small girl, Janette, feels over Juliet, who has become deathly ill with cancer and is getting all the attention. Janette is annoyed at all the telephone calls coming to her home from Juliet's parents giving updates on her condition:
Particularly Janette resented that mommy was making such a fuss having hurried from a phone conversation in another room to squat before her breathlessly in that annoying way that adults often do, when they want to pretend to be no taller than you, but still are much stronger than you, and can grip you in their arms to hold you still, and bring their huge faces close to yours, and their huge teary eyes, so that you can't look away but are trapped and can't breathe.
Oates is also adept at rendering child characters from the perspectives of the adults around them. In "The Bicycle Accident" a child's bike crash occasions a rush of memories from the child's mother: "You have to listen to adults. Literally you have to look up to adults. They lie to you when it's convenient for them, you won't discover it until years later; if they tell you the truth it's because truth gives them an advantage."
Two of the stories in The Frenzy use the difficulty of being able to hear the person on the other end of a telephone call to generate plot. It's a thin conceit for a short story, but an effective jumping off point for surrealism. Psychology Today says that this is a phenomenon fairly common in dreams (in my own dreams it always happens when I'm on a desperate call with an emergency 911 dispatcher) and some psychologists even have a classification for it: "blocked communication" dreams. In the story "The Call" a woman, known to us only as "S.", is awakened by an early morning phone call informing her that her father has died. It must be a mistake, S. thinks, because her father died six years ago. Unable to make out exactly what the caller is saying, she jumps out of bed, telling her husband to go back to sleep, and starts the drive to her mother's home in Yewville in upstate New York (this was also the setting for Oates's 1971 novel Wonderland, Yewville being a stand-in for Lowville) to find out what the hell is going on. Things do not become any clearer, though, in fact it all becomes more confusing when S. seems to be lost not knowing if she lives in a home with her husband or with her mother in the Yewville farmhouse.
Oates is an admirer of Stephen King, she included his short story "The Reach" in the second edition of The Oxford Book of American Short Stories that she edited in 2012. Some critics sneer at horror genre writers like King (sometimes even for his Oates-like voluminous output) but Oates is impressed: "His fiction is famously saturated with the atmosphere of Maine; much of his mostly vividly imagined work—Salem's Lot, Dolores Claiborne, the elegantly composed story 'The Reach', for instance—is a poetic evocation of that landscape, its history and its inhabitants." (Dolores Claiborne is my favorite King novel, it is also his most un-Kinglike novel, mostly leaving the horror that King is so renowned for behind.) "Poetic", however, is a bit of a stretch for "The Reach," unless you don't mind poetic cliche: "The wind blew long, cold notes that fall, and Stella felt each note resonate in her heart." (King also likens the color of snow to white chrome.) Oates's surrealism seems more of a direct descendant from André Breton's than does King's; even in the stories where Oates deploys misunderstood or misheard communication through a faulty telephone connection the readers are not asked to suspend an abundance of disbelief as they often are in King's horror. Despite this buddy-buddiness, it's doubtful that the critics of the future will liken Oates/King as a part of a generation as they did the Lost Generation of Hemingway/Fitzgerald.
Only one of the nine stories in The Frenzy uses first-person narration, and of course the narrator, Maude, is a writer. The story takes place post-COVID, and Maude wants to restart her friendship with a widow, Audra, whom she hasn't seen since before the pandemic. (Audra is in fact twice widowed: "You think of Oscar Wilde's wisecrack—To lose one husband may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.") Prior to their friendship being interrupted by the stay-at-home lock down, they'd been on the verge of being best friends, which embarrasses Maude:
Several times in the past twenty years, Audra and I had been on the brink of becoming best friends. Yet, it had not happened.
Once you are an adult, you tend to avoid such emotional connections. Falling in love, loving an individual of the opposite sex can be risky, arduous, foolish, wonderful; but it is mandated there are parameters, expectations. But once you are past adolescence, the phenomenon best friends is embarrassing, to be avoided.
Or maybe I imagined it, I am likely to imagine things that don't exist for others. You must guard against that, I cautioned myself.
Maude makes the drive to Audra's and one of the things Maude first notices in the home is a copy of her own book on Audra's coffee table. It was a book that Maude had gifted Audra and her now-deceased husband a few years ago. Far from being delighted at seeing her book on Audra's table, Maude feels chagrin: "For it seemed to me that this book of mine had been exactly in that same place, years ago when I'd last visited..." Maude now wonders if either Audra or her husband had ever read her book, and also wonders if Audra knows the book is on display and sure to catch her eye when she comes inside. Furthermore, after they've sat down to lunch, Maude notices a gun leaning against the wall. "Oh—is that a gun?" Maude asks, mortified. It's a .22 rifle given to Audra by a neighbor concerned about Audra's safety after she was left alone in the house at her husband's passing. The explanation does nothing to soothe Maude: "I would tell no one, when I returned home. I knew that such information would be misinterpreted by mutual friends, it would not be to the widow's credit." (Oates is a staunch gun control advocate.)
Like the Pulitzer, Oates's books have been nominated for the National Book Award five times, but unlike the Pulitzer one of her books actually took home the prize. Her novel them received the NBA for fiction in 1970. Oates has said that them and Blonde would likely be the works she'd be most remembered for, and in a 2003 interview with Carol Burns in The Washington Post she said those are the two books she'd want a reader new to her to start with. Oates included an author's note in them letting the reader know that the character Maureen Wendall was based on one of Oates's former students and that the letters in the book to Maureen's teacher were the student's letters to Oates reproduced verbatim. (This was actually a literary device, in a later printing of them, Oates added an afterword saying Maureen and the letters were her invention.) them is a grim book about an impoverished working class family that just can not catch a break. Oates's massive oeuvre contains very little in the way of happy stories—she once said, "I don't know that people need happy books because a happy book is like a happy person—there's nothing to be said about it, nothing to be done to it or for it." Linda Kuehl of Commonweal magazine interviewed Oates in December of 1969 soon after the release of them. Even back then Oates was known for her productivity and Kuehl asked her when she does her writing: "In the evening after dinner. If I start to write, I write about twenty or twenty-five pages, but I don't do that every day. Maybe a couple of days a week or I might write some poems. If I write poetry, I might write two or three poems and then fix them up a few days later." Clearly, Oates and writer's block have never met.
Oates's surrealism is firmly couched in realism; it catches the reader off guard and leaves them temporarily bewildered. (The very first sentence of Franz Kafka's Metamorphoses informs us that a man has awakened one morning to find out he has become a bug—or vermin, depending on who's doing the translating—letting us know what kind of ride we're in for from the get-go.) The sixth story in The Frenzy is "The Redwoods" and we open with a man who loves hiking in the Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California for the solitude of it. "Without his friends who mirrored him, and whom he mirrored, as in a monkey house of jabbering hilarity, Vanbrugh really was another sort of person." This is of course another one of Oates's shots at toxic masculinity, but at least in this instance the male is trying to escape it. "The Redwoods" is also a slight departure from Oates's usual perspective—most of her stories that explore women's fears of losing a husband, or dealing with the aftermath of losing a husband through divorce or death, are told from the woman's point of view. Here we have it from the man's point of view, however it appears to be after he has died and is observing his widow. He listens to her talking to herself, observes her movements throughout the house: "She is exhausted and yet agitated." (Oates allows a rare conjunction between the adjectives here). Oates also plays with character naming in "The Redwoods"; the man may or may not have had an affair with a woman named Lise, and he becomes confused even more about it because of the similarity to his wife's name, Elise. Oates leaves quite a bit up to the reader to decipher from her more complex stories.
Oates had this to say about the critics' remarks on her output in a 1970 journal entry: "...but I work hard and long, and as the hours roll by I seem to create more than I anticipate; more, certainly, than the literary world allows for a 'serious' writer. Yet I have more stories to tell, and more novels." For those aspiring writers who are awed by her prolificness she gave up her secret right there: less time anticipating, more time creating (not to mention the long, hard work). Many of her books have been adapted into films (Blonde was adapted twice) and even her 1966 short story "Where are You Going, Where Have You Been" was adapted into a 1985 movie. Her short stories cover endless themes and topics, but nearly all of them share one thing in common—they have no ending, they just stop.
Author: Hugh Blanton's latest book is The Pudneys. He can be reached on X: @HughBlanton5