Literary Compass By LOUISA THOMAS

IN ROUGH COUNTRY

Essays and Reviews

By Joyce Carol Oates

396 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. Paper, $14.99

     When her husband, Raymond Smith, died of pneumonia in February 2008, Joyce Carol Oates was writing a review of a book about boxing. “No one could know the effort,” she recalls in her preface to “In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews,” “that went into this single ‘review.’ . . . No one could guess that there is a break in the essay between the second section and the section that begins with the words ‘From the bare-­knuckle era of John L. Sullivan’ — the pages before were written by a woman with a husband, the pages following were written by a woman who had lost her ­husband.”

   It’s true. When I read the review (published, slightly altered, here as “Boxing: History, Art, Culture”) in the New York Review of Books in May 2008, I didn’t detect the break, and I didn’t suspect the effort. Oates’s writing has always seemed effortless: urgent, unafraid, torrential. She writes like a woman who walks into rough country and doesn’t look back.

   Oates explains that in choosing the title for this collection of 28 reviews and reflections, she aimed to describe the “treacherous geographical/psychological terrains” of her subjects (a list that includes Flannery O’Connor, Jim Crace, Margaret Atwood and Edgar Allan Poe) and of herself after her husband’s death. The phrase is almost better as a description of her own criticism.

   Here violence is a fact, and survival isn’t confused with redemption. Oates’s prose can be demanding, with her proclivity for slashes (“public/professional”; “celebrated/controversial”), long block quotes and list-making (a mention of “Southern Ontario Gothic,” for example, summons six names, three of them obscure). Yet her writing is often exquisite. Long sentences unfold with great beauty, and her lines of argument follow not an artificial arc but the natural course of thought. As I began to read “In Rough Country,” I sometimes felt — though I knew it wasn’t true — that Oates was writing without a plan, with only her innate genius to direct her.

   About halfway through the book — not at the words “From the bare-knuckle era of John L. Sullivan,” but not long after, while reading “In Rough Country II: Annie Proulx” — I realized that it hardly mattered whether or not Oates had used a map. What mattered was that she had given me one: to Proulx’s fiction.

   The temptation in reading criticism by an author better known for her novels and stories is to inspect it for clues to her own work. And you’ll find them here, in Oates’s attention to the claustrophobia of small towns and families, the warping influences of class and sex, the power and powerlessness of women, the persistent distrust of organized religion and of American mythologizing. But Oates seems to take special, even unusual, pains not to bend her subjects into her own narrative. She is, instead, intensely focused on the books at hand, marking highlights, supplying context, guiding the reader through passage after passage. Her attention, even in a critic’s mode, is unfailingly generous.

Perhaps this is why the personal essays and speeches in the “Nostalgias” section that ends the book are, mostly, less successful. Oates sometimes writes movingly about her past, especially her childhood, but when she advances her beliefs she can be harsh and didactic. Her dismissal of religion, for example, in “Why Is Humanism Not the Pre-eminent Belief of Humankind?” seems brittle when placed against her discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s Roman Catholicism, even to someone disposed to agree.

   Despite her explanation of the title, after the preface there’s little probing of Oates’s own psychology, especially of her widowhood. Perhaps the most telling line comes from a brief, late mention of her remarriage. Like so many of the characters she writes about, Oates makes a virtue of ­resilience.

Louisa Thomas is a contributing editor for Newsweek.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/books/review/Thomas-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print