Joyce Carol Oates: A distorted mirror held up to the passing highway

Say this about Joyce Carol Oates - she always gives you your money's worth. She's written about 50 novels and maybe a thousand short stories? And it seems every one of them gives you plenty of action, clearly delineated characters, a beginning and middle and an end - all the basic expectations of fiction, esp of short fiction. That is, she writes to tell a story. She's not showy in any way, rarely experimental, doesn't have a single defining setting or population of political stance - all of which has probably hurt her reputation in some ways - in there is no such thing as a JCO story in the way that there is clearly a Saunders story, a Carver story, Chekhov story, a Bollano story, and so on. And she's disturbingly prolific, which makes readers and critics think that it's just too easy for her. Actually, writing is never easy. She's just a truly dedicated artist with a copious imagination (and memory). In fact, there is one defining quality to her fiction, and that's the omnipresence of violence - which makes her work generally dark and disturbing. If you buy into her world view, that we are beset by violence and every day's peace is a triumph over the inevitable, then her fiction is a great example of contemporary realism. I think hers is a willfully distorted realism - a fun-house mirror held up to the passing highway. Story "Mastiff" in current New Yorker a good example of her work: 40ish couple just getting to know each other, but no sparks there, especially on the part of the woman, who is actually yearning for a relationship (and a child), though we know this one won't be it - go on a hike, and encounter another hiker with a dog, a mastiff, that he can't control and that attacks the hikers. This experience does not exactly draw the two together as a couple - in fact, it seems to push them farther apart. Well, any hike can go wrong - especially in fiction (I've written about a hiking disaster, too) - but is this how most of us view the world? A peaceful walk through the woods is a likely place for an encounter with a crazy dog? No - it's very JCO, and very frightening, an within the realm of possibility - but not likely, not representative of life as most of us know it. Of course fiction does explore the exception, life on the margins, but JCO's skill is to make us feel that the exceptional, the bizarre, is actually not so - that the world is a crazy and violent place, full of muggings and beatings and maulings. Go there if you dare. Interesting, BTW, that the past two NYer stories about been about hikes through the woods and encounters with violence and almost spiritual identification of the woman hiker with the spirit of an animal (cf McGuane's story about an encounter with a wolf).