Art in no way imitating life

-- And is Charlotte still having her naked pictures done?
-- Well, she's had her pictures taken and her portfolio has been given to the appropriate people.

I went and saw Joyce Carol Oates last night at the Boston Public Library. I've never read her work, and she has the unenviable stigma (and matching spike in book sales) of having been an Oprah's Book Club selection. Even Shannon, feminist Shannon, who makes it a point to read people who have vaginas, if for no other reason, has only read one solitary short story by Oates. But that one story, Shannon liked. She has generally good taste, that Shannon. Further, Oates teaches at Princeton.

Again: I've never read her books, much less studied her, never heard her mentioned as a beacon of contemporary female prose the way people talk of Margaret Atwood or Toni Morrisson. That said, people seem to really like her work. In that vague context she always seemed inoffensive and safe, a Mitch Albom with breasts.

Listening to her speak and read last night just about totally confirmed everything I'd previously thought--every contradictory thing.

Joyce Carol Oates is like two people, the scholar and the writer. The scholar, I feel like I got a pretty good grasp of last night. Of the writer, though . . . I got parts of three chapters.

Those excerpts were filled with florid descriptive elements, statistical data and dialogue that didn't seem real, or even possible for human beings to create without some scholarly humonculus manipulating their vocal chords. Her insights into marriage seemed trite, but the elderly women around me laughed. I say trite because, despite never being married, much less to an empowered menopausal woman, I'd heard all these sentiments before. The horrors of the honeymoon for virginal women in the 50's, the ubiquitous marriage push overshadowing love and even the human male with whom these people betrothed themselves. It all seemed done, played out, tired to the point of exhaustion.

The reading was, though, only excerpted from the first three chapters, and the book (The Falls) apparently takes an abrupt turn after that.

And the reading itself was almost an afterthought in what was a wildly entertaining Oatesian evening. It began with a man and woman seated behind me having the conversation I've quoted above, talking with detached ambivalence about inter-familial pornography the way someone might talk about posting his or her resume on monster.com. "It's been given to the appropriate people." Tickled pink.

When Oates came out, she was introduced by someone who rattled off all of the writer's awards and acclaim. Oates responded that introductions like that always seem posthumous, like she shouldn't be listening. Down-to-earth, self-effacing and morbid. All things I like. She then commented on how nice it was to be back in a city as "civilized" as Boston. She said she'd been speaking in a lot of red states lately. Saying nothing more, she let the audience do the correlating ourselves. Good comic timing.

As a scholar she was so much more lively and pointed than her prose suggested. She evoked more in casual references to social norms than she had in pages and pages of turgid prose. I'm not being fair to her body of work, of course, but she spoke and read for the same amount of time and chose the contents of each, so I have to think she was giving her best on both counts.

She told a story about her [Oprah-sullied] book, We Were the Mulvaneys in response to a person who asked about her inspiration. The following is a paraphrase:

. . . and I put my cat in there. I think it's natural to eulogize animals in books, so I put Muffin in there, and her name was Muffin in the book too. When I told my husband about it he shook his head, "Jesus Joyce." The implication was, of course, "Would Henry James have put his cat in a novel?" I thought, well, Proust would have.

I don't often use this word because there are enough people in the world who secretly wonder if I'm gay [not to mention those who do it aloud], but she was delightful.

Her speaking had a brilliant and off the cuff snap; in person she's a quick and incendiary wit. Her words flow with her memory, an anecdottal and tangientially-connected series of asides that somehow all converged on each other at the end. Strange then, that she should say she's never started a novel without having 100 pages of notes on the subject first, and an idea of where she wants to go. She said she always has the ending written, the first sentence, the last and the title having a kind of triangulating effect on the book itself.

Maybe that's what this dichotomy owes itself too. How this fantastically circuitous and slapdash personality forces herself into the confines of novelistic formula. I'll have to actually read her to find out.

So I'm going to pick up one of her novels, but probably not The Falls, because something of the passion she exudes in person, the wit and worldliness has to be in at least one of them. Maybe I'll just read the short story Shannon has.