From “Blonde” to “Breath…” Joyce Carol Oates puts America under the knife

The house is located near Princeton, half an hour from the prestigious university, one of the oldest in the United States, and an hour’s train ride from Manhattan itself. American novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who taught literature there from 1978-2014, continues to give workshops on writing. The taxi driver looks at his map: “Your address says Princeton, but it’s not quite Princeton. Not really marked on the map. I don’t know where it is, I almost never go there. » He adds: “As they say, you met beasts on the way in this area. »

The taxi will never run into any animals. Unless it’s a weird bestiary specimen: a giant metal rooster, a cousin of the animals cut by Johnny Depp in Fences. Edward Scissorhands by Tim Burton. In the garden of the house, the driver notices another rooster. “Are there many of them?” », he asks, stunned, as is his passenger, Galil with a sheet of paper and screws. This question will need to be asked to the mistress of places whose sudden presence surprises the driver.

A graceful woman is like a mirage. Joyce Carol Oates came to answer the door before her guest rang the doorbell, alerted by the sound of the engine still running. She wears a purple T-shirt, Bermuda shorts of the same shade and subtle make-up that almost makes you forget she is 84 years old. It is impossible for the driver to imagine that in this house of any architecture, far from the colonial style of the residences of the neighborhood, lives one of the most prestigious American authors who sold millions of books. A woman who has long had a taste for fame is constantly playing.

Inspired by her second husband

From this house, he captured the pulse of his country’s darkness in more than a hundred books: politicians, boxers, psychopaths, raped girls, dead women, rich, poor, intellectuals, movie stars make up the frame of the American. A drama whose web she never stops weaving. There are still traces of dirt on his sandals that day. If his mornings are devoted to work – he often writes all at once – the afternoons are devoted to his daily walks in the woods. This walk helps him to free himself from the excesses of his mind, to allow his ideas, to find order and, in fact, the whole reason for their existence. Therefore, it is important for him to immediately deal with them and take the thread of the pen. And Joyce Carol Oates knows how to make her guest feel like she’s breaking his concentration.