Infinite Joyce: Prolific Oates Takes On Dead Wallace

“The day of Vladimir Nabokov’s death — July 2, 1977 — is firmly fixed in my memory, for on the following day Donald Barthelme said casually to me, ‘Happy? Nabokov died yesterday, we all move up a notch.’” Now, 46 years and many deaths — including Barthelme’s — later, there are presumably few notches left above Joyce Carol Oates. Over the past six decades, she’s been acclaimed (she won the 1970 National Book Award and received a National Humanities Medal in 2010, among other honors), popular (she appeared on Oprah’s Book Club in 2001), and prolific (she’s published well over a hundred books — as a novelist, short story writer, critic, and poet). The opening quote, with its image of Oates already, almost half a century ago, nearing the summit of American letters, hints at her present gravitas and seniority. Yet the anecdote’s origin, Oates’s substack, also illustrates her rejection of that role. In recent years, as she has become increasingly preeminent, Oates (who was born in 1938) has seemed to relish undermining people’s expectations, dividing her time between feathering her cap with dignified late-career work, such as her 2020 novel, Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. — a magisterial 800-page meditation on race, death, and modern America, named for lines in a Whitman poem — and ruffling feathers with flip remarks on Twitter (“If Mississippians read, Faulkner would be banned.”) Her latest work, the short story collection Zero-Sum, reflects that duality in both title and content. Oates has no further to go, so to keep churning out her best work, she occasionally has to take a few steps back.