Our group had several comments about this book written by Joyce Carol Oates. A similar consensus was - the stories were captivating and haunting - dark and funny at the same time. Several of the stories left us mystified but also left us with a myriad of insinuations of the plots of each story. We were glad to get together to discuss our different interpretations of the stories.
In the story, "Sex with a camel", it seemed like the boy was trying to make things "lighter" in dealing with the event of his grandmother's illness. There seemed to be another time that they went through this process in another hospital, maybe with the grandmother or the boy's mother. The boy deals with the pull of suicide and the grandmother battles against her illness. The grandmother and the boy find humor and companionship to succeed in dealing with their issues.
In "The Mastiff" we all wondered why the owner would bring this vicious dog out around others. Maybe the dog sensed fear in the woman and attacked because of this. Since the man was her hero, the woman felt obligated to take care of the man while he was in the hospital.
In "Lovely, Dark, Deep", the female became very assertive toward Robert Frost who was very "cantankerous".
We discussed all the titles in this collection of diverse stories.
The review below covers some of the points we brought up in our book discussion. Reading "Lovely, Dark, Deep" and all the stories in this collection was a "challenging experience."
..."The prolific Oates (Carthage, 2014, etc.) returns to short stories with this collection of 13 tales examining the reactions of humans confronting the final baby boomer frontier—death. Oates’ characters—including an assortment of deteriorating “great men,” isolated, lonely, middle-aged women, and couples on the downslide—encounter harbingers of their eventual fates with every canker sore, abortion, scab and biopsy. Elusive neighbors, living beyond an area of unexplored boundary woods, haunt the lives of aging suburbanites in “The Jesters” while a puzzled wife, in “The Disappearing,” mulls over the significance of her husband’s divestiture of his personal possessions. The enervating effects of a brush with death are examined from the points of view of a survivor, in “Mastiff,” and, in a twist on 1950s teenage-car-crash ballads, a victim, in “Forked River Roadside Shrine, South Jersey.” The collection’s titular story delivers a skewering of Robert Frost in its unsympathetic riff on the facts of the poet’s life as well as a testimonial to the role of the poet’s craft as a hedge against mortality. The aging literary lion in “Patricide,” Roland Marks, allows Oates another opportunity to poke at the myth of the “great man” of literature while providing clues as to which man of American letters may have annoyed Oates the most."... Kirkus Review - https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joyce-carol-oates/lovely-dark-deep/
In the story, "Sex with a camel", it seemed like the boy was trying to make things "lighter" in dealing with the event of his grandmother's illness. There seemed to be another time that they went through this process in another hospital, maybe with the grandmother or the boy's mother. The boy deals with the pull of suicide and the grandmother battles against her illness. The grandmother and the boy find humor and companionship to succeed in dealing with their issues.
In "The Mastiff" we all wondered why the owner would bring this vicious dog out around others. Maybe the dog sensed fear in the woman and attacked because of this. Since the man was her hero, the woman felt obligated to take care of the man while he was in the hospital.
In "Lovely, Dark, Deep", the female became very assertive toward Robert Frost who was very "cantankerous".
We discussed all the titles in this collection of diverse stories.
The review below covers some of the points we brought up in our book discussion. Reading "Lovely, Dark, Deep" and all the stories in this collection was a "challenging experience."
..."The prolific Oates (Carthage, 2014, etc.) returns to short stories with this collection of 13 tales examining the reactions of humans confronting the final baby boomer frontier—death. Oates’ characters—including an assortment of deteriorating “great men,” isolated, lonely, middle-aged women, and couples on the downslide—encounter harbingers of their eventual fates with every canker sore, abortion, scab and biopsy. Elusive neighbors, living beyond an area of unexplored boundary woods, haunt the lives of aging suburbanites in “The Jesters” while a puzzled wife, in “The Disappearing,” mulls over the significance of her husband’s divestiture of his personal possessions. The enervating effects of a brush with death are examined from the points of view of a survivor, in “Mastiff,” and, in a twist on 1950s teenage-car-crash ballads, a victim, in “Forked River Roadside Shrine, South Jersey.” The collection’s titular story delivers a skewering of Robert Frost in its unsympathetic riff on the facts of the poet’s life as well as a testimonial to the role of the poet’s craft as a hedge against mortality. The aging literary lion in “Patricide,” Roland Marks, allows Oates another opportunity to poke at the myth of the “great man” of literature while providing clues as to which man of American letters may have annoyed Oates the most."... Kirkus Review - https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joyce-carol-oates/lovely-dark-deep/
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