Reception and analysis
Literary critic Wendy Lesser in The New York Times reports that Oates's "own enormous body of work" has become a burden that the author carries into her collection Heat and Other Stories, which deal largely with "parent-child struggles." [5] Lesser offers the story "Shopping" as an example of Oates's thematic concerns in this volume: the story is not a Gothic horror reminiscent of Poe, but "transcends" that genre to present normality "in all its terrifying nakedness." [6] She compares Oates's handling of violence in stories with that of fiction writer Paul Bowles:
Mr. Bowles hinges his plots on inevitable violation, and he also aims to shock us...Behind his gruesome tales is a stern moralist, a person who trusts that we readers (if not his characters) are still capable of sharing his disapproval and disgust. Ms. Oates, on the other hand, is as cavalierly cynical as a teen-ager. Her stock in trade is precisely not to seem shocked, and she pretends to be equally, mildly, analytically interested in all forms of human behavior, however grotesque. [6]
Biographer and critic Greg Johnson offered this praise for the collection:"Heat and Other Stories represent Oates's full maturity as a writer of short fiction, the genre that best exploits the versatility and intensity of her narrative gifts." [7]
Booklist also reviewed the collection. [8]
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
