Customer Reviews

Sentimental Education

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In reading this collection, I got the feeling Oates was whispering these stories instead of speaking them out loud. These are secret stories, tales from within the parts of life that are not made public. From the title tale with its summer infatuation that goes disastrously wrong, to all the other pieces here, once again Joyce Carol Oates delivers where so many others writers would have tried and failed.

There is a story in this book about a philosopher who can't stand to see big, brawny guys picking on girls in bars, but who is likely to get punched squarely in the face if he attempts to assert that the tough guys are misbehaving. It wouldn't be so psychotic if the story was not set so late in his life that this compulsion to repeat his behavior whenever he encounters the same stimuli is likely to put him in the hospital. I can't remember where I put this book at the moment, but I'm sure the story is in A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION because it helped me appreciate Joyce Carol Oates as a writer who is capable of revealing the moments that tell us the most about who we are.

Modern readers deserve to have their emotions described for them in the kinds of settings which they are increasingly exposed to in a world that pushes information overload to a point where even a simple sexual fantasy, presented in the story, "The Tryst," ends in a macabre mess that is in danger of being reported on the local evening news. Events at the largest level reflect tiny episodes in our past, as the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, in which a young George Bush helped transfer two naval vessels into the covert supply ships, the "Houston" and the "Barbara," could be preparation for a President Bush of a later generation to supply Americans to the unfree people of Iraq for their liberation. Considering people in another country so unfree that the United States does everything it can do to encourage the people to overthrow the government that is bothering the U.S. most at the moment is scant preparation for sending Americans to face the situation on the ground, come sandstorms or high water, which would be really unusual in Iraq, but it might be compared to what readers could learn about people from this book, which is small but can still be as shocking as any newspaper.