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I Am No One You Know: Stories

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I can only expect something staggering and literary when I pick up Joyce Carol Oates. I am No One You Know is one of the darkest and most disturbing short-story collections I've ever read. And I've read my fair share of incredible short stories! Oates writes about rape, murder and depression like very few writers. These stories are thought provoking and gripping, beautiful and poignant. My favorite stories are "Upholstery," "The Girl with the Blackened Eye," "Fire," "Mutants," and "Three Girls." Each of these stories enthralled me from beginning to end. Their messages affected me. I cannot recommend this short-story collection enough. It is the perfect thing to pick up if you're in the bargain for some deep reading.

There is little doubt that Joyce Carol Oates is not afraid to write about all the things we fear: child abuse, rape, neurotic parents, murder. But just when you think that you have got her pegged, she writes a lovely story like "Three Girls" about a chance meeting, viewing really of Marilyn Monroe by two uppity yet driven-to-distraction-because they see a star college girls at a bookstore in downtown NYC. ("...Marilyn Monroe. She gave us a book. Was any of it real?") Then of course she includes "The Girl with the Blackened Eye" in this collection that recalls her recent "Rape...A Love Story" and once again writes of a brutal rape.
The stories in "I Am No One You Know" are uneven which pretty much goes hand-in-hand with this type of story collection...i.e. taken from many sources, written over the course of several years. But nonetheless there are several real doozies, for example : "Aiding and Abetting, " about how families look away when there is real horror amongst their own and how a huge price can be paid for this and "Fire" about the pleasures of alcohol ("Drinking clarified. Confusion dissolved.")
Oates is equally at home in the short story and the long format form. And, of course she has written brilliantly in both. But there is something about Oates's short stories that draw you in even closer, telescope and make what she is saying even sharper and "I Am No One You Know" contains some shining examples of this.

Ms Oates is one of the finest living writers, particularly in the short story form. As only the most skilled storytellers can, she can hook you with the first line and deeply involve you in the lives of her characters in the first paragraph.

I must object to a comment that the reviewer from Booklist made about the story "Me & Wolfie, 1979." The reviewer completely missed the point of a moving story about a bright, sensitive boy and his bi-polar mother. Despite the problems she created for him, she also introduced him to a world of magic and beauty. Moving and not soon forgotten.

Arguably, this is the best collection of short stories ever published by Joyce Carol Oates. Her focus in this book is trauma, from the most personal and emotional to the most global, i.e. The World Trade Center Disaster. Her elucidation of the psychological is center stage in all of her stories. Each story depicting a truly personal trauma, the book takes the reader through the pain and effects of the death of parents, the influence of serious mental illness, the difficult love and emotional interactions of a student who is seduced by a teacher and many other topics that reflect what we have seen going on in the American Society in the last decade.

Always, there is the ever present hardscrabble existence of those in the Upstate New York environment, the struggle to make a living, and the struggle just to live with the prevailing conditions of the region. The struggle to live and live with one's own thoughts and experiences is truly brought to the surface.

From a writing standpoint this book finds Joyce at the apex of her short story writing career. The stories are carefully crafted, with the use of multiple literary techniques. Her use of phrases to highlight and illustrate specific intensities of thought and feeling are wonderfully blended with a writing style that grips the reader like a pipe wrench. The reader is drawn into the lives of the characters time after time. Her stories do not always resolve, leaving the reader to extrapolate the future of the characters. The pictures she paints with her words are explicit and the most intense examples of human reality. This reality is mixed most explicitly with the internal feeling of most of the characters that they are unique and that they are "No One You Know."

The book is recommended for all serious readers of modern literature. It is a classic in all respects. Do not miss this opportunity to read some of the best short stories ever put in one book.

Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 in upstate New York State and is a distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton. She gained fame with her first novel With Shuddering Fall in 1964. Now four decades later, she is the author of scores of novels and other works. The present work is a selection of short stories that have mostly appeared in print before as individual pieces.

If you have read some of her novels and not been terribly impressed, then read this collection of nineteen short stories, and keep on reading until the end. Oates gives us a treat at the end with her story on Marilyn Monroe at a bookstore. You will understand why she is a professor at Princeton. I got interested in Oates after reading a short story by her and I still think that it is her best area, better than the long novels. She has a number of short story collections.

Oates is known for her emotional and dramatic stories, often with women caught in stressful situations, and often set in her native upstate New York. The present collection contains many of these elements plus a lot more. Most stories involve women, women and families. or women and other family members.

The stories are short and intense and some involve crimes, criminals, or people just released from prison. A few involve people with mental handicaps.

This is a dramatic and entertaining stuff that most Oates fans will love.

As a bit of a bonus, one story takes place in a book store and Oates gives us an interesting reading list which I will repeat here:

Freud, "Civilization and Discontents,"
Crane Brinton, "The Age of Reason,"
Margaret Meade, "Coming of Age in Samoa,"
D.H.Lawrence, "The Rainbow,"
Kierkegaard, "Fear and Trembling,"
and
Mann, "Death in Venice."

I AM NO ONE YOU KNOW is the most recent collection of previously published short stories by Joyce Carol Oates. This latest assortment consists of nineteen tales that range from "In Hiding," a creepy tale about the one mistake a person might make in the spirit of generosity that will ultimately bring danger to her/him, to a very charming tale about two friends who happen upon Marilyn Monroe in the famous Strand bookstore in Manhattan. The body of work produced by Ms. Oates is outstanding for its range of topics and its breadth of forms. Her stories are so intense that they immediately grab readers and keep them reading.

But more than that, Oates leaves her reader reeling from the way she handles her characters, settings, dialogue, descriptions and on points timeliness. "In Hiding" begins as a pleasant story about a divorced poet/teacher/translator who lives with her teenage son in upstate New York. One day she receives a packet of poetry and prose from a stranger.

"Please accept my poetry as a gift. I love your poetry truly. Even if you don't have time to read my writings. Even if you don't have a feeling for it. I understand. His name was Woodson Johnston, Jr. --- 'Woody.' He was an inmate at Kansas State Penitentiary in Fulham, Kansas." She read the poems and the few diary entries he had sent: "She'd given in to impulse [and] mailed off [a thank you] card, and that was that!" But of course it isn't.

"Three Girls" is a "typical" New York story, with two students, "NYU girl-poets drifting through the warehouse of treasures as through an enchanted forest, known to them as Strand Used Books on Broadway and Twelfth [during a] snowy March [evening] ... in 1956." In their giddiness among the great books stacked in mile-high piles, one of them glances up and sees "an individual ... pulling down books ... a woman nearly my height ... in a man's navy coat to her ankles and with sleeves past her wrists, a man's beige fedora hat on her head, scrunched low ... and most of her hair hidden by the hat." At first the storyteller is unable to place this woman who is so deep in the study of the tomes she's pulling off the shelves. "The blond woman turned, taking down another book from the shelf, and I saw that she was Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe. In the Strand. Just like us. And she seemed to be alone. Marilyn Monroe, alone!"

Still unrecognized, she appeared to be a book junkie just like the other customers. But by 1956, "Marilyn Monroe had entered history, and there was no escape from it." Or was there?

Of the nineteen stories, the third that is especially noteworthy is "The Mutants." In this truly realistic and timely tale, a young woman who seems to have been "touched by the angels" has moved from her Midwestern home to New York City. She is blond, beautiful and loved by all who know her. She lives in a gorgeous apartment with a breathtaking view, she is engaged to be married and "... as always on weekday mornings her fiancé left the apartment early. She'd gone out shortly after 8 a.m. to a nearby Kinko's to pick up a color ... manuscript (of a children's book) and she was crossing ... [the street] ... when she heard a droning noise at first annoying and then alarming as of a gargantuan hornet and when she looked up she saw a sight so unnerving her eyes at first refused to decode it; an airplane, a commercial airliner, enormous, flying unnaturally low, careening out of the sky and of her stunned vision behind a bank of buildings as, in the next instant, she was thrown to her knees on the pavement by a colossal explosion ... she fell, slivers of glass were pelting her exposed skin ... yet her reflexes were ... rapid ... and in nearly the same second in which she heard [another] explosion ... she was running into ... her building ... past individuals stunned" [into frozen beings.] When she reaches the sanctuary of her apartment, at first she thinks she's in a daydream until she realizes "she was beginning to breathe strangely. Her mouth was coated with a fine dry dust ... why was it so dark? The sky had vanished."

She hesitates and is confused and really doesn't know what to do. Should she try to get out, or should she stay? Was she the only person left inside --- was she the last person alive? Her psyche is too overwhelmed; she is incapable of making a decision about what to do. Her paralysis in the face of what feels like an apocalyptic event is a fascinating character study and reminds us, again, what 9/11 did to our country and our people.

The remaining sixteen stories that comprise I AM NO ONE YOU KNOW are as moving, thrilling, frightening, amusing and economical as these. Joyce Carol Oates stands as one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Her canvas is painted with a wide variety of subjects: boxing, religion, murder, politics, relationships, law, health, morality, rage, suburbanites and city dwellers. Her overreaching and kaleidoscopic talent embraces the American scene and its populace. The stories in this collection are a pastiche of the themes, style and versatility of subject that has marked her career as a writer.

She has said that "all of us who write work out of conviction that we are participating in some sort of communal activity ... [understand that] in general the writing writes itself." Only an artist who is confident in her work and ideas could make a statement of such sweeping proportions. In her art Joyce Carol Oates has reached far beyond the realm of the ordinary, and in so doing has created a body of work that will endure.

--- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum

Again Joyce Carol Oates is gritty, frightening, writting with humanity and beauty (it is there, just open up your mind's eye and look). And with apparent ease she is a great stylist. This a great collection of stories, written by Chekov's spiritual daughter.

I Am Know One You Know is one of Joyce Carol Oates's best story collections in a long while. My favorite story is "The Girl With The Blackened Eye," where a girl remembers her abduction, her killer and the killer's victims--whom Oates does best at writing from the POV looking inward from a character as he/she looks outward into their harsh, most often horrible environments of life. My second favorite story would be "The Mutants," a story of a woman caught in the thread of terror on the morning of (possibly) September 11, 2001. Though Oates does not specify it is 9/11, but we can use our imagination within the story, which I think is best achieved than by labeling it as a "9/11" story. "The Mutants" is a bizarre title. It is a title that again shows Oates using the protagonist's inward views of being distraught in the face of terror: "A mutant being, primed to survive. Were there not undersea creatures that required extra sets of gills, eyes on stalks on either side of their blade-thin heads, cunning in the desperation of survivial..."

I recommend this solid collection of stories by JCO.

Every small town has a dark story, usually with facts commingling with legend. There is the one about the woman who married a man who may or may not have killed his parents. And everyone has heard about the gangly, brooding high school kid who has an affair with his unhappy teacher with tragic results. In her breathtaking collection, "I Am No One You Know," Joyce Carol Oates is able to take what is essentially tabloid fodder and elevate it to an American archetype. Oates achieves this by keeping the violence always in the back story, while placing on the main stage the human attempts to come to terms with experiences that no one can ever really come to terms with.

In one story, "The Girl with the Blackened Eye," Oates tells us about a girl who survives an encounter with a serial killer. Years have past and the narrator, the victim, is now an ordinary housewife. Her matter-of-factness in recounting the tale of her abduction and brutal rape is chilling. In the hands of most writers, even good writers, such material descends into cliche or self-parody. Oates pulls it off. The victim, it turns out, cannot bring herself to hate her kidnapper. The reader will not share this feeling but will understand it.

Oates sets most of the stories in non-descript towns in upstate New York, where she is from. One gets the sense that she is trying to come to terms with the worst of the place by giving voice to survivors, who are flawed yet surprise us with what they are able to summon, both good and bad. This violent book is clearly an act of affection.

Oates is one of my favorite authors and I've read quite a few of her works. Obviously, I have many more to read, considering how often she publishes, but I'd like to think I know something about her stories. I've read a few of her short story collections and this one is my favorite thus far. I'd highly recommend this if you've yet to dive into her short stories. This is a great book with which to start.