A literature teacher always hides a potential writer. If the subject of the letters is very vocational, every lover of these ends up trying to replicate their favorite authors, those whose works they try to instill in the students. In the case of Joyce carol oates, It is not only possible to point out her performance as a teacher of Language and Literature. It should also be noted that she also has a degree, a doctorate and a Master in the subject of language and its most artistic re-creation (Literature).
So aesthetically, structurally and functionally we find that Joyce writes with full knowledge of the facts. But of course, if the background did not like it, it could never have reached where it has, being a writer recognized throughout the world. Being able to be pretentious before such a monster of letters, I am going to cheer up with his three best books (I will always have the excuse that it is my entire opinion).
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Joyce Carol Oates
Sitter
Locating a thriller outside all the influence of the current technological times has many advantages. In the first place, we recover that remote sensation that serial killers moved better outside the current systematic control to which any citizen is subjected, not without a certain general permissiveness. So it is not so easy to protect yourself in anonymity as a serial criminal. But it is also that, in a plot like this, everything makes more sense by taking us back to a not so remote past, where the atrocious could have sustenance in certain social strata. This is how this story conspires to peek at a disturbing scenario both for the plot itself and for the context.
The year is 1977 and Hannnah and Wes Jarrett, a respectable businessman and member of one of the most powerful families in Detroit, live happily with their five and eight-year-old children in their suburban home. Ismelda, her maid, makes everything at home more bearable. But his life and that of his neighbors is shaken by the presence in the city of a murderer whom the media have dubbed Babysitter: he has already kidnapped and tortured six children and has left their bodies on the road in conspicuous postures, as if they slept
At a Jarrett family philanthropic party, Hannah meets Mr. R., a strange and darkly charismatic man with whom she begins a dangerous affair. Meanwhile, the elusive serial killer, who seems to be part of Detroit's elite, continues to rack up victims and drive the city to despair.
Babysitter is a psychological exploration of the darkest corners of the human psyche and a devastating critique of racism, sexual violence, homophobia and misogyny.
Zombi
Historically the book has always been considered The catcher in the rye as a great narrative that gets us into the head of a problematic and nihilistic boy, separated from all social conventions and with a psychopathic point that is evident in each of the scenes. But honestly, this other Zombie book really opens us up to a more complete profile of psychopathy in those difficult stages of adolescence.
The border between dislocation, uprooting, the denial of all value and the psychopathic profile can be very slight in these developmental ages… And in that aspect this novel is much deeper than the famous work of Salinger. In any case, it is curious how these two American authors outlined the notion of an American youth that sometimes faces too many stridencies between fiction and reality.
Summary: Meet Quentin P., a headache for his professor father and loving mother. A challenge for your highly qualified psychiatrist. A sweet and tender young man for his unconditional grandmother. And the most credible and horrifying sexual psychopath ever created in fiction. At thirty-one years old, and on probation for racial assault on a minor, Quentin P. has two obsessions: the first, to prevent someone from entering his soul.
A Book of American Martyrs
Writing about marginal characters or limit situations/approaches or sources of conflict are a specialty for this author. Double standards are the result of a mental capacity to unfold reality to suit the consumer. In other words, live in an enormous contradiction or in a gigantic lack of scruples. The United States is a representative country of double standards, established among its population as the greatest of sophistry.
An American loves his fiercely capitalist social system for his eagerness to prosper in it, but he also detests it and curses its foundations with equal intensity when he discovers each night that he has failed to climb one iota.
It is only an example, but it is essential to understand what an American is capable of regarding his conscience and his opportunistic perception of reality. Of course, not everyone moves under this dynamic. Naturally, a large part of the population of a country, deep down must be intelligent enough, critical and consistent to discover this nefarious contradiction, at least in its harshest interpretations.
The issue of abortion facing the death penalty is a clear paradigm, although not so common, if prolific as soon as a new case transcends. The conscience capable of harboring the idea of ​​abortion as murder and which in turn accepts the death penalty as a sentence of the judicial system, has succumbed to the most extreme of contradictions.
Luther Dunphy murders an abortion doctor: Augustus Voorhees. Luther paid with death whoever he understood was infringing death. Homegrown justice brought about by that double standard. However, this story moves more on the terrain of the collateral consequences of the devastating double standards.
Because right away we get closer to the lives of the daughters of Luther and Augustus. Dawn Dunphy becomes a renowned boxer while Naomi Voorhees seeks her space as a film director. They both act with the heavy burden of their parents' emotional inheritances. The ideal would be to think of a reconciliation, a kind of expiatory and reconciling encounter. But from the outset, both women continue to appear very far apart, despite the fact that life insists on planting them face to face.
From such an encounter the most unsuspected scenario can arise. Internal conflicts, assumption of guilt, desire for revenge ..., and a possible transformation of all that amalgam of sensations and feelings into a wisp of hope that could illuminate the social conflict, perhaps only surmountable in that area of ​​shared life experience.
Other recommended books by Joyce Carol Oates ...
Evening. Dream. Death. The stars
Family interiors hide the greatest tragedies worthy of being narrated. Because in the strange evolution of time that moves everyone away from what was their nest, fraternity can end up being the melting pot where vanities, ambitions and old grudges are mixed. On this stage, Oates moves with his incomparable ability to recount the path to perdition and disaster as a kind of atavistic condemnation of the human.
John Earle McLaren, "Whitey", an affable sixty-seven-year-old man who was once the popular mayor of Hammond, witnesses an altercation between the police and a dark-skinned young man who has been arrested for no apparent reason. After being morally forced to intervene, the two agents attack him with such unbelievable force that Whitey dies of a heart attack.
This last heroic act opens the door to a much darker reality in the McLaren family, whose five children will face the duel revealing their prejudices, grudges and insecurities: from the racist disdain towards the mother's new partner to the sneaky strategies to get most of the inheritance. Under a façade of respectability hide a rotten foundation, which can cause the family home to collapse.
Informer
Dystopia is not a horizon but a reality. But neither is it a matter of posing it narratively as avant-garde argument in a science fiction plot, nor of opening uchronies towards that more or less close world, with its fearsome parallel course lurking to intersect with ours.
When Joyce Carol Oates writes she offers us that obscured glimpse so it shouldn't be at any level., even in the familiar. What we do not want to happen in the roulette of our lives. The most personal paradise, the utopia from the realization…, the opposite of this horizon sticks to our skin like the dystopia of annulment, of alienation, of the assumption of defeat that makes us pass as servile citizens. Always to the sound of suffocating double morals and general imaginary, even from within our own home ...
What should prevail: family loyalty or loyalty to the truth? Is it ever a mistake to tell the truth, is there a time when lying to family is justified? Can you do the right thing and be sorry for it all your life?
Informer stars Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who remembers her life after, at the age of twelve, she gave her testimony about the racist murder of an African-American boy by her older siblings and they separated her from her family.
In a succession of episodes remembered in an almost palpable way, Violet analyzes the circumstances of her life as the youngest of seven siblings, a girl in her beloved moment, who inadvertently "betrays" her siblings, leading to their arrest, their conviction. and to his own distancing.
This moving novel depicts a life of exile with respect to parents, siblings, and the Church that forces Violet to rebuild her own identity, to break the powerful spell of the family. A long exile as a "informer" to reach a transformed life.
Magical, gloomy, impenetrable
This author is also a great story builder. Dark settings as far as the soul is concerned.
Summary: Incisive, disturbing, astonishing in their acuity, the stories of Magico, somber, impenetrable reveal the prodigious capacity of Joyce carol oates to put the magnifying glass on the terror, pain and love uncertainty that lurk at the limits of the most common lives.
The erotic links that arise from terror and gratitude, the vulnerability of a woman fearful that her husband is disappearing from her life, a birth that brings with it the end of a relationship, or the controversial story that gives the book its title, where The aging poet Robert Frost is visited by a disturbing young woman who knows more than she should.
Magical, somber, impenetrable shows an artist at the peak of her creative capacity, stripping the darkness that inhabits the human soul in thirteen gripping stories.
