 First edition | |
| Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Ecco Press |
Publication date | 1988 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| ISBN | 978-0-88001-200-3 |
The Assignation is a collection of 44 works of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates published by Ecco Press in 1988.[1]
Stories
- “One Flesh”
- “Slow”
- “The Boy”
- “Sharpshooting”
- “Tick”
- “Photographer’s Model”
- “Accident”
- “Mule”
- “A Touch of the Flu”
- “Holiday”
- “Éleuthérie"
- “The Abduction”
- “In Traction”
- “Romance”
- “Only Son”
- “Bad Habits”
- “Anecdote”
- “The Quarrel”
- “Pinch”
- “Secret”
- “Ace”
- “Heartland”
- “Maximum Security”
- “The Assignation”
- "Fin de siècle"
- “The Bystander”
- “Shelter”
- “Party”
- “Stroke”
- “Adulteress”
- “Superstitious”
- “A Sentimental Encounter”
- “Señorita"
- “Face”
- “August Evening”
- “Picnic”
- “Visitation Rights”
- “Two Doors”
- “Desire”
- “Train”
- “The Others”
- “Blue-bearded Lover”
- “Secret Observations of the Goat-Girl”
- “The Stadium”
Reception
Literary critic James Atlas in The New York Times reports that these stories—simply “narratives” according to Oates—possess “the peculiar virtues and defects of her distinctive voice.”[2]
Noting that few of the pieces exceed a “seven of eight pages,” Atlas registers this critique: “Too many of these stories seem like exercises or false starts. Some are so fragmentary that it's hard to get your bearings; the story's over before it's begun.”[3]
Kirkus Reviews also points to the brevity of the stories - “no more than two of three pages”[4] - which amount to mere “sketches” dealing almost exclusively with death and decay. The reviewer judges the collection “Vintage Oates—always interesting, though not always pleasant.”[5]
Publishers Weekly offered a mixed appraisal to the collection, observing that the fiction “offers brilliant bursts of energy that are both dazzling and disappointing for their ephemeral nature” but adding that the stories “reveal a master of the form writing at her efficient, full-tilt best.” The reviewer also pointed out the shortest of these narrative “ranging in length from a simple paragraph of five sentences to a dozen pages at most…”[6]
Critical assessment
“In The Assignation, one of Oates’s two collections of ‘miniature narratives,’ such tales as “Blue-Bearded Lover” and “The Others" recall nineteenth-century Gothic literature, while others convey the kind of hothouse psychological intensity, the precarious balance between sanity and madness, traditionally associated with the genre.”[7]
Johnson adds that “With their brief, truncated scenes and their poetic intensity, they have a brutal, sometimes horrific impact, lying bare with deft economy and unflinching directness the anxieties, longings, and obsessions lying just beneath the surface of ‘ordinary’ life.”[8]
Though “sinister strangers,” appear in a number of these works, literary critic Gretchen Elizabeth Schultz cautions “that many of the stories in The Assignation...involve figures thoroughly familiar to the protagonists, family members for instance. In “Heartland,” a daughter visiting parents” whom she hasn’t seen in a very long time” is left wondering if she has ever really seen them at all (and if they have ever really seen her.” In “Bad Habits,” it is a wife who has trouble recognizing the husband “who squinted up at her without seeming to recognize her.”[9] Schultz traces the stories in The Assignation to Oates’s earliest literary efforts:
Readers of the rest of Oates’s work will not be surprised that many of the characters in [this] collection lose the selves they may or may not find again…other selves as have haunted Oates’s work and menaced the lives and psyches of her characters from the very start.[10]
References
- ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 218-221: Selected Bibliography, Primary Works
- ^ Atlas, 1988: “Ms. Oates calls them ‘narratives’...and these ‘'narratives’ have the peculiar virtues and defects of her distinctive voice.”
- ^ Atlas, 1988: “Tantalizing in their brevity, these stories have the transient shock effects of a newspaper headline.”
- ^ Kirkus Reviews, 1988: “Most of the 44 stories collected here are very short—no more than two or three pages…”
- ^ Kirkus Reviews, 1988
- ^ Publishers Weekly, 1988
- ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 83
- ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 83
- ^ Schultz, 1994 p. 204: “...sinister strangers…” And p. 212: Notes, no. 4
- ^ Schultz, 1994 p. 203-204: Ellipsis inserted for brevity, meaning unaltered.
Sources
- Atlas, James. 1988. “Dabbling in Love—Not the Nice Kind.” The New York Times, October 2, 1988. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/02/books/dabbling-in-love-not-the-nice-kind.html Retrieved 19 November, 2023
- Johnson, Greg. 1994. Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne’s studies in short fiction; no. 57. Twayne Publishers, New York. ISBN 0-8057-0857-X
- Kirkus Reviews. 1988. Bookshelf: The Assignation. Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 1988 https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joyce-carol-oates/assignation/ Retrieved 18 November, 2023
- *Oates, Joyce Carol. 1988. The Assignation. Ecco Press, New York. p. 193 ISBN 978-0-88001-200-3
- Publishers Weekly. 1988. Assignation. Publishers Weekly, September, 1988. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780880012003 Retrieved 19 November, 2023.
This page was last edited on 3 December 2023, at 15:09