Джойс Оутс: Sourland

Oates s latest collection explores certain favorite Oatesian themes, primary among them violence, loss, and privilege. Three of the stories feature white, upper-class, educated widows whose sheltered married lives have left them unprepared for life alone. In В»Pumpkin-HeadВ» and В»SourlandВ», the widows-Hadley in the first story, Sophie in the second-encounter a class of Oatesian male: predatory, needy lurkers just out of prosperity s reach. In the first story, our lurker is Anton Kruppe, a Central European immigrant and vague acquaintance of Hadley whose frustrations boil over in a disastrous way. In the second story, Sophie is contacted by Jeremiah, an old friend of her late husband, and eventually visits him in middle-of-nowhere northern Minnesota, where she discovers, too late, his true intentions. The third widow story, В»ProbateВ», concerns Adrienne Myer s surreal visit to the courthouse to register her late husband s will, but Oates has other plans for Adrienne, who is soon lost in a warped bureaucratic funhouse worthy of Kafka. Oates s fiction has the curious, morbid draw of a flaming car wreck. It s a testament to Oates s talent that she can nearly always force the reader to look.