The (Other) You

Starred review from October 19, 2020
Oates (Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars) delivers a dark, moody collection permeated by themes of obsession, remorse, and violence. In the title story, a secondhand bookstore owner ruminates over the college entrance exam that sealed her fate to remain in humdrum Yewville, N.Y. A sinister twist surprises in “The Women Friends,” in which two women find themselves in the same café as a jittery suicide bomber. The café reappears throughout the book, culminating in the gripping “Final Interview,” where a notoriously reclusive author imagines a final act of vengeance against the world. Dashed hopes and glances at the past interrupt another author’s life in “The Unexpected,” in which the protagonist returns to Yewville to deliver a commencement speech, only to be humbled by friends from her childhood. The recently widowed creative writing teacher at the center of the brilliant “The Happy Place” discovers not even a reckless obsession with a student could fill the gaping hollowness of her empty house, while mourning and blame overwhelm the parents of a deceased child in “Nightgrief.” Oates’s mastery of the form remains fierce and formidable in this unsettling collection of lamentations and missed opportunities.

December 1, 2020
In her latest, stirring story collection, Oates portrays characters who acknowledge the seasons, their current predicaments, and their faulty powers of mind as they thread the fractured possibilities of their lives. Characters confront aging, mortality, and shifting relationships, often beleaguered by triumphs and terrors large and small. In "The Women Friends," two longtime confidants meet at a caf�, where the widening gap in their relationship is compounded by one friend's realization that a suicide bomber may or may not be sitting at a table on the periphery. The caf� is again the setting for "Waiting for Kizer," when two strangers unexpectedly chart their very similar lives yet very different perspectives. Other tales explore husband-and-wife relationships. In "The Bloody Head," a woman's idyllic vacation shifts after a hotel guest is injured in an accident and she must decide whether or not to go to his aid, leading to an unexpected revelation. In "Nightgrief," a mother navigates the complex aftermath of trauma. In these haunting and timely tales, there are no easy answers for Oates' characters as they contend with life's labyrinths and provocations.

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Starred review from December 1, 2020
Crackling with pent-up emotion and deadly devices, a suite of neatly intertwining stories by a masterful storyteller. "Whichever side the Professor espoused in an issue, the wife felt obliged to take the opposite side. Sometimes in the midst of their squabbles the wife lost interest abruptly and allowed the subject to fade." If Oates has a trademark theme, it is in people talking past and against each other instead of getting a clue. In the first story in this collection, a woman, addressed in the second person, who has given up most of her dreams to live in a small town near Buffalo, "gnawing at your embittered heart," thinks only fleetingly about what might have been. Though she seems to have accepted her lot, we have reason to think that, now late in life, she might have regrets. So does the woman who goes to a place the reader will see several times, the Purple Onion Caf�, where something terrible will happen. It would be a spoiler to say what, but Oates expertly folds the episode up in a Twilight Zone-ish wrinkle in time, one that we will return to at several points. One character dies in a way of which Edward Gorey would surely approve; most, in these stories laden with somber meditations on death ("For when 'hospice' is uttered, it is at last acknowledged--There is no hope"), succumb to the ordinary: cancer, accidents, and now terrorism. "Their friends and neighbors are collapsing all around them!" ponders one academic, aging but not yet old, who has been playing a parlor game of sorts in guessing whom the Reaper will harvest first. In the end, not many people in Yewville or the leafy suburbs of New York make it out of Oates' pages without at least a few scars, and the Purple Onion suffers plenty of dings as well, which makes it a book that seems just right for the times. Few short story writers do as much in so few words as the economical, enigmatic Oates.

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