JERSEY BOOKSHELF: ‘Zero-Sum,’ by Joyce Carol Oates
Zero-Sum (2023)
by Joyce Carol Oates
(Knopf Publishers)
Surrealism, horror, comedy, social satire, feminism and revenge are platters best served hot. Legendary writer Joyce Carol Oates, 85, is the author of 160 books. Starting in 1964 and continuing with her new book Fox, Oates, who lived in Mercer County for 32 years and taught at Princeton University, is best known for We Were The Mulvaneys, Blonde (a look inside the mind of Marilyn Monroe), The Falls, Daddy Love and Foxfire: Confessions Of A Girl Gang. But her pugilistic treatise On Boxing was brilliant as were her Zombie, Beasts, Rape: A Love Story, The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Mudwoman, Wild Nights: Stories About The Last Days Of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James and Hemingway and, my personal favorite, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque.
In 2023, her Zero-Sum came out and recently blew my mind. The short stories in this explosive volume get weirder and weirder. “Monstersister” is about a growth on a girl’s head that just keeps getting bigger and bigger…until it pops off and starts dominating her. It’s disgusting, ridiculous, outrageous and nasty but its pure brilliance kept me up all night until I finished it. “Mr. Stickum” may or may not be a sexual predator but the high school girls who ultimately torture and kill him are so certain he is that their actions seem almost justifiable. “The Suicide” is put off because the novelist who decides such keeps editing his note. Is the story a thinly-veiled reference to celebrated-but-tortured writer David Foster Wallace who, in 2008, hung himself at 46?
Oates can get downright creepy and deliciously strange. She delves into the psyches of broken people with broken minds who do unspeakable things. “The Baby Monitor” is installed by a batshit crazy mother. Oates writes with a mounting sense of dread, a claustrophobic crack in the sanity of the protagonist, and one reads it knowing what this woman is going to do. In “The Cold,” the reader realizes there’s more going on underneath the surface than what was first thought, and the inescapable conclusion has to be that no amount of help will help. “Lovesick” will tear your heart out.
The most Jersey-centric of the stories is “This Is Not A Drill” in which the state screams the kind of warnings that force citizens to stay indoors due to “an imminent health crisis.” The paranoia and fear rise when schools, churches, highways and stores are shut down. Gunshots can be heard in the streets. Clouds, “like misshapen tumors,” grow larger. Birds fall from the sky dead. Electronic devices no longer work. Scavengers roam the streets killing. It’s The Apocalypse, as presented by America’s most prolific writer ever.