Denver Post Review Joyce Carol Oates Black Dahlia & White Rose Stories
Fame and Misfortune
"Black Dahlia & White Rose" is Joyce Ballad Oates's 25th book of short stories. Her immense productivity — the torrent of novels and stories that began in the early 1960s — means that every release meets with the aforementioned question: Does she have annihilation fresh and urgent to reveal at this point in her long and very fine career? The answer, with her latest, may depend on how you regard Oates'southward descriptions of older women.
The stories in this collection more often than not involve a combination of macabre events, fantastical turns and unguarded starting time-person storytelling. Throughout, Oates explores the rough fortunes of (more often than not) women who think they're in control of their situations merely are inevitably proved incorrect, sometimes brutally so.
The title story juxtaposes ii aspiring starlets from 1940s Los Angeles. Ane, Elizabeth Short, was rechristened "the Blackness Dahlia" by the gutter press during a lurid murder investigation occasioned by the discovery of her mangled trunk, split up apart at the torso. In Oates's rendition, Betty speaks from beyond the grave about how she lived and died, and likewise offers a catty running commentary on her roommate, a sure Norma Jeane Bakery.
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This fragile "White Rose" interests a foreign, shy doctor who secretly attends their photo shoots and eventually invites both women to dinner. Wiser and (past her own flawed reckoning) more than alluring, Betty deceitfully gets the doctor all to herself, and while he's kissing, chloroforming and butchering her, we hear from Norma Jeane, who's upset because Betty has failed to pick her up from the bar where they'd planned to meet. She has interim grade in the morning time, and likes to wait good for it. "Information technology is ever an audience," she declares, in a line that resonates with historical irony and firsthand import. "Yous don't know who is observing you."
In writing again about Marilyn Monroe 12 years after her novel "Blonde," Oates doesn't reimagine her subject in any notable ways; instead she uses Monroe'southward pre-celebrity life to add a speculative dimension to an already enjoyable bit of noir fiction. How unlike might American popular culture have been if sexy, celestial Norma Jeane Baker had been the unknown immature actress who'd gone to dinner with a murderous voyeur rather than sexy, vampish Elizabeth Brusque?
With its strong contrast of dark and light sensibilities, voices and fates, this first story seems to offering an interpretive key to the rest of the collection. But few of the following stories sustain that much scrutiny. The weaker ones read like strained experiments (a narrator watching a trapped bird in the Newark airport is so moved by its predicament that she grows wings) or mechanical exercises in building psychological and emotional suspense (a bored woman becomes too involved with an unstable stranger searching for his possibly murdered married woman; a sneering boyfriend plots to publicly embarrass the famous begetter who never best-selling him).
Other stories business concern downwards-trending older women, their interior funks and their desperate efforts to overcome the unremitting demands of motherhood, marriage and careers. In "Spotted Hyenas: A Romance," the suburban married woman of a pharmaceutical executive has dreamlike, unmerciful encounters at night, which inspire her to wait up a field biologist she knew in graduate school. In "Anniversary," a smug academic seeks new purpose by condescendingly teaching inmates, simply to die from a casual oversight involving a purloined pencil sharpener.
These stories, and then very different in premise and action, attest to Oates's always impressive range, only a minor detail suggests a symptomatic flaw. Both the suburban wife and the smug bookish wear black cashmere-and-wool combinations: "sharply creased" slacks and a "tiny, tightfitting" jacket in i case, and "a short, trim jacket" and "fitted trousers" in the other. This could exist an intentional, imagistic doubling in stories that announced quite close to each other, meant to convey subtle insights near the predicament of fashionable, older women seeking vital experiences through misconceived means. And so again, it might just be rote prose from a author so skilful at what she does and then well that the struggle for a new angle of approach is long gone, fifty-fifty if that doesn't stop her from going on and on.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/books/review/black-dahlia-white-rose-by-joyce-carol-oates.html
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