 First edition | |
| Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Ecco Press |
Publication date | 1988 |
| Publication place | United States |
| 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]
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]
“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]