Lovely, dark, deep : stories /

readers will forgive a book almost anything if it has vitality. That's why "The Goldfinch" has been so indomitably successful, despite its half-drawn gangsters and its slippage toward melodrama, and that's why Dickens transcends the mawkishness of Little Nell and John Jarndyce. That's why Shakespeare's detractors, from Tolstoy to Ira Glass, always look foolish. The sheer livingness of those writers eclipses their faults. Joyce Carol Oates has been betting on that clemency for a long time. Her fast novel, "Carthage," was a mess - but a powerful mess, and at their best, her books have a loose, impressionistic style, more Frans Hals than Carel Fabritius, that gives them an irresistible feeling of forward flight. Both "Blonde" and "Them" deserve their place in the canon of American fiction. The trouble is that Oates publishes so much that isn't at that level. By now it's a tradition for reviewers to cite her paralyzing backlist, more than a hundred books long, but that pace seems relevant only when you feel it in the writing. Alas, it's never been more evident than in her new story collection, "Lovely, Dark, Deep" - a fatally slack enterprise, a makeshift heap of first drafts, blighted by shallow emotion. I winced again and again as I read it. Wallace Stegner liked to say hard writing makes for easy reading; this feels like easy writing, and it makes for hard reading. The book's 13 stories are focused mostly on women, many of them middle-aged, negotiating with themselves how to live after the blind momentums of youth have slowed. In "Mastiff," Mariella watches as a man she's recently begun to date protects her from a dog's attack; in "The Hunter," a visiting poet at a college has an affair with the institution's president; in "The Disappearing," a woman begins to wonder if her husband is secretly constructing a second life. Oates is concerned with how much more precarious happiness is for women than men: "It's insane to be vulnerable, as women are," she writes, in a representative line. "Nothing is worth such hurt." This is a fine theme, which Oates has explored with subtlety in the past, but here she fails it. Most immediately, the prose feels virtually unedited. Distinctive words ("dismay," "heedlessness," "exude," "alacrity") reappear with distracting swiftness, for instance, and twice in a few pages a house is described as a "sprawling old Victorian," an echo of a cliché. These may seem like minor infelicities, but in fact they're the vanguard of the book's far larger and graver carelessness: its big, rushed emotions; its offhand manipulation of trauma. One story is about an abortion, another about a possible suicide; several deal with cancer. But these are only hooks, convenient shocks, sketchily deployed without any real deference to their immense emotional complexity. Oates's admirers might argue that there's something healthy and free in her directness, and that her stylistic lapses are part of this effusion, the bravura befitting the confidence of a late-stage master. But deep vitality and deep artfulness can exist together, as Elena Ferrante and Philip Roth, for example, have proved; the chilled perfection of the M.F.A. novel isn't the only alternative to slapdash haste. The truth is that the world doesn't give up its secrets easily, and great fiction, though it appears in a thousand different disguises, is always suffused with respect for the mystery and multiplicity of life. Everything else is soap opera. CHARLES FINCH'S most recent novel is "The Last Enchantments."

Oates, one of few writers who achieves excellence in both the novel and the short story, has more than two dozen story collections to her name and she continues to inject new, ambushing power into the form. Here she zooms in close to characters locked in strange and intense negotiations. In Sex with Camel, the uneasy banter between a hyper teenage boy and his elegant grandmother indicates a lifetime of tension and fear. Animals play key roles. In Mastiff, the nervous female narrator with a wild little laugh is hiking with a man she doesn't think she'll see again when they encounter a monstrous dog. A jobless Stanford graduate under pressure from his father in Betrayed becomes an intern at the bonobo exhibit in the San Diego Zoo and undergoes a disturbing transformation. Oates is at her caustically splendorous best in the title story, a brilliantly choreographed, diabolically brutal pas de deux between the aging poet Robert Frost and a seemingly timid graduate writing student with the Edgar Allan Poe name of Evangeline Fife. Oates' stories seethe and blaze.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist

Oates's (Carthage) newest collection characteristically mines the depths of the female psyche to find darkness there. In particular, she deals with women who hide medical procedures-including, presciently, abortion-from their loved ones ("Sex With Camel," "Distance," "`Stephanos Is Dead'") and with women who struggle to assert themselves in relationships with their artistic, self-absorbed fathers ("Things Passed on the Way to Oblivion," "Patricide") and with lovers ("Mastiff," "A Book of Martyrs," "The Hunter," "The Disappearing"). Throughout, the lines that define these secrets and hidden desires captivatingly blur and dissolve. "The Jesters," about aging suburbanites who eavesdrop on their neighbors' seemingly picture-perfect life as it shatters, conjures both elements, and then ups the ante with a paranormal twist. A pair of longer stories-the title story, "Lovely, Dark, Deep," which is a fictional reimagining of a young poet's interview with Robert Frost in his twilight years, and "Patricide," a longer exploration of a stifling father-daughter bond-expand on these themes. As the interloping fiancée of "Patricide" says of her deceased lover, the Phillip Roth-esque Roland Marks, "He knew women really well-you could say, the masochistic inner selves of women." We might well say the same of Oates, with the same complimentary awe. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.