Customer Reviews

Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates

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This biography exhaustively plumbs the life and career of Joyce Carol Oates. Although not a biography I would normally seek out, since I've read only a few of her books, "Invisible Writer" was named a "Best Academic Book of the Year" by the American Library Association and received glowing reviews, so I was curious about its content. I was immediately taken in by this sweeping, thoughtful, and superbly written account of a consummate writer's writer. Although Johnson does not shrink from criticizing his subject--her controlling behavior, her tendency to depict "friends" in her fiction in unflattering ways, even an occasional veiled threat of revenge to an unfriendly reviewer--he presents on the whole a fair, balanced portrait of a writer for whom art is almost her entire life. This should be read by anyone interested in writing or writers.

This biography by Greg Johnson is good. I don't know if something more detailed can or has been written about J.C.O., because I have never come across any other biographies which to compare it with; it is informative, but it is simplistic. I read past reviews where readers felt that J.C.O. was looming over the author's shoulder telling him what and how to write. I agree with that observation, because there is a tone or quality of restraint that I felt upon reading it out loud. As J.C.O. fans, I think we were expecting something more -- something that goes beyond the dark fiction that has made her such a unique literary figure. I think we were expecting her to literally have lived the lives of the characters that she has created. But she is not Hemmingwaylike or Iask Diensonlike in that she writes in a fictionalized autobiographical way, as these two did. I believe she uses some personal experiences -- as most writers do, but she is firmly grounded in the turmoil of our country. She hasn't lived the lives of her characters in the truest sense of the word, but she writes about the possibilities of the lives she could have lived. Hemmingway wrote about soldiers and fishermen, etc..., because he was all of them. Isak Dienson was an aristocrat and a farm owner. She wrote about that and beyond. J.C.O. has led an academic life, and in her free time, has thought and thought and thought about socioeconomic conditions that shape human actions and behavior. I don't feel that she is a writer who writes from experience, but a writer who writes through the attainment of knowledge from books and the people around her. I think it is a very honest biography -- true to the work ethic that has made J.C.O. one of my all time favorite writers. To reiterate, this is not an exciting biography -- quite bland, really. But it sheds some light on the Oates mystique.

I read this book over the weekend and I couldn't put it down. During my college class in English literature, I first discovered Joyce Carol Oates and her special style of writing. Her talent overpowers and this biography explains her passion for writing. The candid photographs in the center of the book show how her drive consumes her bodily as well as spiritually. Greg Johnson explores her novels and tells how they come from her personal experiences of life and her family. Even though her own parents seemed rather doting and conventional, her grandparents certainly led a bizarre and violent life. Joyce takes childhood memories of her school life in a one room environment and expands the events into another painful experience of growing up and early adolescence. Joyce expresses that eating to her is not important; she feels that writing sustains her enough. But she complicates her life with eating because it is necessary. Her life is filled with another tortuous phy! ! sical problem caused by her own arrhythmic heart. It seems like she constantly battles against her own body and sometimes loses in the encounters. I enjoyed the personal information, explaining her works and today I went to my local library to search for "Wonderland." But they have 58 of her works and no "Wonderland." The author details the main character in this novel, "Jesse Vogel." So since my maiden name is Vogel, I was determined to find out more about this character with my family name. The author explains most of her novels and writings in this biography and reading about them makes you want to discover the many talents that Joyce Carol Oates brings to us through her devoted passion to writing and her immense talent. The Invisible Writer shows us how one person can bring so many characters alive through her works and yet want to remain as much as possible in the background. She speaks in her writings and her writings show us the wor! ! ld as no one else can.

Invisible Writer is throughly researched and well written. I found it very readable, even though I was not a fan of JCO's. I'm still not a fan of hers. Greg Johnson manages to create a fair portrait of JCO as a human who is sometimes prickly and vain. I understand other reviewers' comments that he's too soft on her, but I see it as him being careful to be fair in writing about someone who is still producing some of her best work. Oddly I didn't find that his treatment made her more likeable, only that it made JCO someone with whom I can empathize.

The greatest question remaining about JCO is the violence, especially sexual, in her work. A childhood sexual incident is mentioned, but it seems rather mundane. Johnson refers to some of the hardships suffered by JCO's family, but those hardships doesn't seem to explain well enough how this quiet, intellectual woman lives in such another world in her writer's imagination. Perhaps that's the intrigue of JCO.

I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of Joyce Carol Oates's work (there was a time in my life when I thought her early short stories were fantastic, but her later work never impressed me), but I found this biography extremely satisfying. Johnson writes about Oates as an admiring friend (almost like Boswell to his Johnson), relating all the stages of her life and career: her childhood in Niagara County, NY; her college days; her marriage; teaching in Detroit; her move to Princeton. He writes about Oates's work, of course, but never in an analytical way - it's not a literary biography, but a biography about a writer. He is a most appealing writer in this regard, and he makes us interested in his subject as a person/teacher/writer in a most compelling fashion. Johnson is a very impelling writer; I found the book a real joy to read - and informative, too.

Recommended to Oates readers. The author has done a thorough job detailing the life and work of an enigmatic woman whose work is now perhaps better known by reputation (violent, Gothic, incredibly voluminous) than by content. That this should be the case is not surprising, since it is necessary to sift through a mass of writing of uneven quality if one wants to know what Oates is getting at, and in this sense "Invisible Writer" performs a necessary service by providing us with capsule summaries of each of the novels and many of the short stories and backtracking to the reception they received at the time, with Oates' own opinions on many of them. Space does not permit for any but the barest critical assessments, and this lack of a perspective on the work (other than the consequences for Oates' career as a whole) is the book's major weakness. It does a better job on bringing Oates herself to life, often through her own correspondence and notebooks. Perhaps its greatest contribution to future Oates scholarship lies in the revelation of a mystical experience Oates underwent at a turning point in her career, leading her from her formerly pessimistic, rather Romantic perspective to a disavowal of romanticism in favor of "collective consciousness"; her work since then has been less realistic, more postmodern, and, for many, of decreasing interest. Oates herself appears to have changed from a frightened and intense young woman to a happier person who is also a curious mix of selflessness and off-putting narcissism. Still, she comes off as a mostly (if not completely) sympathetic figure. On the whole, this book makes the best of a challenging job.

I believe JCO is arguably the best writer to emerge in America in the second half of the 20th century. That said, I read this biography with much interest and found in it plenty of information about the elusive, invisible persona of JCO. However, as much as I appreciatted Mr.Johnson's obvious labour-of-love research and detailed account of the life and times of JCO, I found the whole thing somehow biased as a overly soft and timid portrait of a mysterious, enigmatic woman. I found many of the elements mentioned in the book suggested tremendously interesing points of entry into JCO's personal and psychological universe. None of them were explored. It seems like Mr.Johnson always stops at the threshold of the dark cave and then points his typewriter at some nice, peculiar social event. As I was reading, I felt Mr.Johnson limited his approach to recount little know facts with admirable accuracy and attention to detail, but reading any novel of JCO tells us more about her mind and soul that recounts of many dinner parties at Princeton. If you're interested in this wonderful writer, this book is surely helpful in reconstructing the outside of her life, and most interesting in its depiction of the inner workings of the literary world mafia, but I'd say very far from being the truly meaningful journey into JCO's mind that I'd like to read. I wouldn't like to discourage anyone interested in JCO to reads this, because it is a worthy and valuable read and Mr.Johnson deserves credit for taking on a difficult subject and rendering a never faltering narrative, but I believe JCO, and her readers, deserve even better (and specially braver) and will feel wanting for it. A good first look at this fascinating writer, sure, but she remains as invisible as she was before we opened this biography. Since JCO is after all still very much alive and kicking (her last BLONDE proves she as good as ever or even better), maybe it is a matter of time and perspective. Maybe Mr.Johnson himself, given time and distance, will offer us a deeper reading of JCO. He is surely an able writer and a keen researcher. I'll surely be there to check all the fascinating stuff about one of my favorite authors that this time, somehow, proved invisible, but smellable.

This book was invaluable in writing a term paper on my favorite author; passed the book around class and they loved it!

Engrossing treatment of fascinating woman. Johnson treats her gently, but manages to create a well-rounded picture of a woman who has sparked off so much admiration, awe, contempt, envy and even hatred within the literary community alone; and who has been forced to mentally distance herself from her own public persona in order, it appears, to keep herself sane. Johnson uses as his central image the invisible woman -- invisibility the shield Oates attempts to retreat behind to live her rather placid, work-obsessed private life as Joyce Smith. While this division between public and private identities -- and the struggle to navigate the space between -- is hardly original,it did strike me as an effective and moving angle from which to view Oates. Oates has, in her career, fearlessly cut against the myth of woman writer (as someone who should concern herself with domestic life) and serious/great writer (someone who should produce one book every five or ten years). Johnson reveals a vicious underside of critics and writers who can't seem to deal with the phenomenon that is Oates without attacking/ belittling her on a personal level. Love her, hate her, or merely (god forbid) like her, Joyce Carol Oates appears to be a richly compelling presence in each of her two lives; and Invisible Writer is a rich, compelling read.

Admittedly, Johnson undertook an ambitious and daunting project. Oates, frequently (and annoyingly) labelled our "most prolific" writer, has amassed a considerable volume of work -- novels, short stories, poetry, plays, essays. Her range is amazing, limitless (though her productivity has become somewhat of a literary joke). As a "subject," Oates has challenged interviewers to present the "real" Joyce Carol Oates. She herself is quite taken with the many faces of JCO -- writer, wife, teacher. So, apparently, was her biographer. Unfortunately, Johnson never gets far enough past his admiration of this underappreciated writer to actually reveal anything new about her. The biography begins promisingly enough with a retelling of Oates's family life and education. But from there, it begins to unravel, relying on a chronological record of Oates' writing life. While Johnson does an admirable job of describing Oates's passionate and incredibly committed approach to her craft, his "love" for his subject hardly allows for an objective presentation. One can almost hear Oates editing him: "No, not that way. It wasn't like that. Rather..." Nevertheless, devoted Oates readers will appreciate this book. It is slow-going, and the biographer has certainly "glossed over" certain thorny issues in his retelling of the Oates myth (e.g., her anorexia, her "perfect" marriage, her "rivalries" with other writers), but the book offers neat insights into the writing life (the successful writing life) and intelligent comments on Oates' work, particularly her fiction.