Reviews for Invisible writer

The average rating for Invisible writer based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-05-25 00:00:00 Joe Cecala I am in the process of deciding how much I want to devote myself to reading more Joyce Carol Oates. Reading Invisible Writer has helped me tentatively decide that more JCO is in my future. I do have to find something for JCO post-1998. (Ending in mid life of a prolific writer is the major disability of this book.) I am giving it four stars. I enjoyed reading it and think it will be a good reference as I cast into the JCO Novel and Short Story Pond for future reads. Joyce Carol Oates extensively uses her own life and her observations of the lives of others to construct her fiction. What the book portrays as it moves through her life in tandem with her abundance of writing is that she does not alter characters to give some privacy to the specific people written about. This may be one thing if the person is a serial killer or the work is historical fiction but quite another if s/he is an ordinary person who is living her/his own private life. JCO has no scruples about using real people and situations without any evident regard to any possible negative impact on a person. You can see that by using her real-life experiences of the world, she can achieve psychological and sociological realism. While this is a skill, calling it art is questionable. It is one thing to expose yourself and quite another to expose an innocent human being through satire or unkind references to another’s private life. She has taken some flack in her career for this invasion of privacy but never changed her ways. Her books often found their genesis from a sensational newspaper headline. I have read several of Joyce Carol Oates’ books and expect to read more. I was curious about this author who writes about strange people and violence so I thought I would look at a biography. Invisible Writer is the first biography I found. It is a friendly, authorized biography. While there are no damning revelations, there are some negative characteristics that are presented as what others think about JCO. Her books got some bad reviews and some people don’t like her and even may be considered as enemies. While everyone has a right to their opinion, biographer Greg Johnson mostly tries to give you the facts rather than his opinions so you can draw your own conclusions. Maybe it does not need to be said, but JCO is a very complex person. It does a good job winding together her life and how much of her work is autobiographical. We move with her from her young days as a bright student in a one-room rural school to her days as a financially well off and famous adult, a professor at Princeton University. For me, it helped connect the dots of JCO’s life and work. This is a linear book that takes JCO’s life several years at a time in order. It tells about the events of her life and the books she wrote. It does include the “how” of her writing, interesting to see that change over the years not to mention how she had a hard time being rich and famous. It is possible that she has thrown away more manuscripts than many authors have published in their lifetimes. And all of this with a typewriter and not a computer. She did try word processing briefly but found it did not fit her style of writing so she went back to a typewriter. In her teaching Ms. Oates typically use the name J.C. Smith, her married name. She has written books under several pseudonyms. She tried identifying herself as J.C. Oates as well as J. Oates Smith to disguise about her gender. Women writers faced discrimination in the literary world. She found this was true in publishing and in academic studies throughout the period that this book covers. She comes to consider herself a feminist although, like most things about her and her work, there is some disagreement about that self identification. The most notable problem with this biography is that it was published in April, 1998 and JCO continues being a prolific writer. So the book, with its good coverage from 1938 to 1998, just ends fairly unceremoniously. You have to find another book for the years after 1998. I suppose that this is always a problem with biographies of living people: they just keep on having a life even after the publication date. JCO has probably written another 40-50 books. Anyone got a recommendation for a post-1968 book or are we going to have to wait until she dies? Invisible Writer is not quite a leisurely stroll through JCO’s life. JCO was a jogger and did not slow down or take a break from writing. I do not know if she is still a jogger at her current age of 73 but she was “obsessive” about it when she was sixty. That is probably a good word for a lot of things about JCO. If you have read or plan to read a lot of JCO, you will find this biography interesting as well as instructive for your reading. We go through her writing almost book by book. The biography will give you some ideas about which books you might want to read. You have a lot of choices and she does move through her social cause period and her mystical period and her realist period. You might pick a few books at random when you start as I did but you will very likely want to know about your choices before you get into the deep water. (Actually, there may only be deep water, no shallows.) Invisible Writer is very interesting since it relates so much to the author’s books. It has significant notes, a bibliography and an index so it can be used as a reference book. It also has a list of JCO’s published works as the 1998. The book covers the first sixty years of the life of a prolific writer who has kept churning her words right up until this very moment. Whatever big events in writing or living that have happened since 1998 are not to be found here. In many ways, psychological, physiological and in work habits, Oates swung like the pendulum. Think bipolar. For quite some time she never read newspapers and at other times she found her ideas for novels in the newspaper. She would be outgoing and then shy, high energy then depressed. One thing that has been a constant in her writing career is her significant output of words. At one point she wrote a finished product start to finish with minimal revisions. At another point she laboriously revised and reworked as the major aspect of the completion of the novel. She once withdrew one novel at the publisher to replace it with another. She even modified one novel after it has already been published. What is it about Joyce Carol Oates? Is she psychologically differently abled, protected by her wealth and status? She does specialize in writing about some pretty quirky, weird, disturbed people. And they are in many ways evidently based on her view of herself and her life.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-01-15 00:00:00 Angela Bebo Every few years I reread this book of our preeminent living American writer--Joyce Carol Oates. I know, some people would put Roth up for this, but not me. I started with those early collections--Upon the Sweeping flood, By the North Gate, Wheel of Love, Marriages and Infidelities, in falling-apart Fawcett paperback editions, dotted with my mother's home hair dye... when I was learning to write, these were the stories I returned to, time and again. what emotional extremes! Then came the early novels, Garden of Earthly Delights, and them... The Gothic, long sentence American fiction that's a direct line from Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor... wonderful to go back through her development and early years, the successes of earthly delights and the National Book Award for them... Her sheer productivity seems to have somehow kicked her out of the running as our greatest living literary genius. CRazy. What a pleasure to trace the interplay of this life and the life of her fiction.