Joyce Carol Oates’s Enigmatic Pain

Aradical uncertainty surrounds the reputation of Joyce Carol Oates. Her longtime friend, the late John Updike, called her “America’s woman of letters.” Marilynne Robinson has praised her “extraordinary imaginative power.” She is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, she taught writing for many years at Princeton, and, with her late husband, Raymond Smith, she edited the influential literary journal, The Ontario Review. If there is any longer such a thing as “American literary culture,” Oates may be at the center of it.