Customer Reviews

Tenderness

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Joyce Carol Oates, Tenderness (Ontario Review Press, 1996)

While I'm a huge fan of Joyce Carol Oates' prose-- Cybele alone would have me singing her praises as one of America's finest living novelists, the rest is icing-- I've never been all that enamored with her poetry. Tenderness is an improvement over the volumes I've read to date, but honestly, not much of one. Every once in a while, she turns a good phrase or catches a really fine metaphor, but there's still a somewhat distressing lack of subtlety here, and when what little there is flies out the window, sometimes the resulting work is just painful to read:

"It's an ordinary morning & an ordinary flight, even in my new skin that's a fact I must acknowledge!
I've been here before, I meet myself returning swaying from the lavatory, I avoid my eyes!
Through the pressurized cabin waft the usual psittacosis viruses, Bacillus leprae, airborne TB!
Belted snug in Seat 2B my faceless companion reads Forbes,
I am belted snug at 30,000 feat reading Scientific American!
Must mark off universe into units of a certain length I am reading!
Infinity with a geometric figure I am reading!"
("Frequent Flier II")

Ouch. Three pages of this. (And, yes, every line that does not end with a question mark ends with an exclamation point. It's Tappy Tibbons afraid of flying.)

I rush to point out that most of the book is not this bad. It's not great, mind you, but this, I suspect, is a nadir for Joyce Carol Oates writing in any form. The strongest pieces ("Like Walking to a Drug Store, When I Get Out"), not surprisingly, are those where she returns to the same ground she covers in her strongest novels--getting inside the heads of the damaged, the twisted. Unfortunately, there are far too few pieces of this ilk here; I suggest grabbing this from the library and reading them, rather than adding this to your collection. **