Donnelly Library's Lovely, Dark, Deep Discussion Highlights

Donnelly Library had its fourth meeting of the Pulitzer Prizes Reading Group on Thursday, November 10, 2016 when we got together to discuss Joyce Carol Oates’s short story collection, Lovely, Dark, Deep.

This was our reading group’s second time to meet and discuss a short story collection; at the third meeting, we had discussed Cheever’s short story collection. Oates is a divisive author. Some reading group members love Oates and some hate her writing. However, no matter how participants felt about the stories, there was dynamic discussion at our meeting. Some of the highlights from the discussion include the below. 

• The stories focus on the relationship between the sexes and often include fragile women characters who depend on male approval, often the approval of a husband or father. The group discussed if Oates’s portrayal of women is old fashioned or if many American women today still define themselves in relation to the men in their lives.

• Group members noted a lack of dialog between the characters in these stories or at least a lack of serious discussion between the characters. Participants observed that a lot is communicated between the characters without being said. This was seen in the first story of the collection, “Sex with Camel,” where the grandson and grandmother joke around with each other, but Oates still lets the reader know how much the characters care about each other and how ill the grandmother is.

• Two of the stories that the discussion focused on were stories about authors: “Lovely, Dark, Deep” and “Patricide.” The group discussed why stories about authors are popular and if they may be especially appealing to authors and awards committees. These two short stories also sparked a discussion about how what we know about an author can color how we view their work. We discussed if literature should be judged entirely separately from the author and if it is possible to divorce a poem or a novel from the image of the creator.

• Short story collections can pose difficulties for reading group discussions as there isn’t one main narrative for the group to discuss together as there is when the group is reading a novel. Reading group participants may all want to discuss different stories. On the other hand, short story collections provide reading groups with the opportunity to explore many different works by an author at one time.

Personally, reading Oates always makes me what to read more Oates (or in the case of this collection, I wanted to read more of Oates’s fiction and to revisit Robert Frost’s poetry).

What did you find most interesting about the fourth meeting’s discussion or about the short stories? Please post in the comments below.

Books truck display of books by Joyce Carol Oates,
Robert Frost's poems, and books about Frost.

Reading Now In Las Vegas!

Las Vegas readers will be discussing Joyce Carol Oates' Lovely, Dark Deep November 10 at 6:00 pm at the Thomas Donnelly Public Library.

Questions for Donnelly Library's Discussion of the Lovely, Dark, Deep

Donnelly Library’s Pulitzer Prize Challenge reading group has its fourth meeting on Thursday, November 09. Below are a few questions to think about for the upcoming discussion.

Take a look at the questions and please post your own questions or discussion points for this short story collection in the comments below.

• A common theme of the books we have read for this reading group is that characters are haunted by their pasts. What events or traumas haunt the characters of Oates’s short stories?
• Oates writes a great deal about the relationship between the sexes in these short stories. What does she have to say about the role of women and the role of men in American society though these stories?
• In the title story of the collection, Oates paints a dark, brutal portrait of beloved American poet Robert Frost. In this story what is Oates criticizing, Frost himself, literary celebrity, literary biographies, biographical interpretations of literature, or a combination of these things?
• Including this short story collection, Joyce Carol Oates has been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist 4 times (her other finalist books include her novel Black Water, finalist in 1993, her novel What I Lived For, finalist in 1995, and novel Blonde finalist in 2001). Why do you think she continues to be nominated for the prize, and why does she continue not to win?

Gallup Discussion: Lovely, Dark, Deep - Turning Bonobo

Most of Joyce Carol Oates' stories in "Lovely, Dark, Deep" are firmly set in reality.  The problems people have in the story are typically those we could face in the real world.  Three exceptions can be found in the collection.

Forked River Roadside Shrine, South Jersey is a kind of ghost story.  Anyone whose seen a roadside shrine, usually decorated in pictures, flowers, and the occasional teddy bear, immediately knows their meaning.  They exist to memorialize someone who died in a car or motorcycle crash, and often serve a second purpose, reminding everyone of the dangers of the road.  Forked River follows the spirit of "Kevie" as he witnesses people from his past visit his shrine.

Jesters is a very different ghost story, one where the ghosts might be a bit more active in the physical world.  An elderly couple feels harassed by their noisy neighbors, only to find that the house is long abandoned.  But for our discussion group, there were some strange moments in the story where our protagonists' perspectives are called into question, like when they can't figure out which one of them drove to "the Jesters'" house.

The members of our group saw similarly unreliable storytelling in Betrayal.  In this story, a young man gets an internship at the zoo working with bonobos and his parents are not particularly thrilled.  As he grows to love this non-paying job, his father, in particular, becomes hostile towards it, noting there was "no future" in the zoo.  Towards the end, the son seems to disappear, until the parents realize that a new bonobo in the habitat is there son.  He had betrayed them for the bonobos!


In a collection where most of the stories are pretty comfortably grounded in normalcy and upper middle class problems, this is by far the strangest story.  Some of our readers had their doubts about the son, Rickie's, transformation.  Whether the parents were delusional or Rickie really did turn bonobo, the story was a clear metaphor.

Members of the group pointed out Rickie's rejection of his parents' values.  "All of us feel somewhat estranged from our kids," one reader noted.  The parents had a hard time accepting the path Rickie was choosing for himself.  They couldn't understand him, and one person suggested, "the world of bonobos was just as strange to the parents as his own chosen lifestyle."  So maybe they really had thought Rickie turned into a bonobo, but it wouldn't have been much different to them if he had just joined the zoo staff instead.  It still would have been a betrayal in their eyes.

Gallup Discussion: Lovely, Dark, Deep - Frosty Reception

Joyce Carol Oates' "Lovely, Dark, Deep" was a divisive collection.  At our discussion in the Octavia Fellin Public Library, one story probably stood out as the most divisive of them all, and that was the titular tale, Lovely, Dark, Deep.

To briefly summarize the story: a female journalist interviews a famous and beloved poet, attacking the image he has cultivated for himself, revealing the far more awful man below the surface.  What makes this a particularly controversial story is that the poet is Robert Frost, a real poet who is both famous and beloved.

More than one voice in the discussion group brought up an interesting question, "Why couldn't this story have used a fictional poet instead of Robert Frost?"  The interviewer, Evangeline Fife, is a fictional character, so despite Oates' claim to base the story on real sources, it is an entirely fictional one.  Frost never had this confrontation.  So why not just create a fictional poet instead?

There was an interesting response to that argument.  One woman at the discussion thought that because he wasn't a fictional character people had stronger reactions.  Without Robert Frost, it's just two pretend people having a conversation.  None of our preconceived notions about Frost align with the image created by Oates.  Perhaps, Oates was shattering an idol.


This lead to many other issues.  For example, the lack of sources sited by Oates.  If Frost had been an actual good person, did Oates have the right to demonize him?  And if Frost was not who we all thought he was then what should we think of his works?

There were two sides to this argument.  The first side thought that we could look past a flawed man to embrace his works.  One person asked, "Does the character of Bukowski or Pound ruin their works?"  A fair question.  Without a doubt, these were great writers.  On the other side of the argument was a much more contemporary figure: Bill Cosby.  It would be hard to appreciate The Cosby Show knowing what we know about Bill Cosby now.  In that situation, the legacy of the man seems to have ruined the works.

I'm not sure there are any correct answers here.  Sometimes great works transcend the people who write them.  Sometimes great works are destroyed by them.  There was no universal consensus on Frost or Oates, and most everyone had very mixed feelings on the story, but we all walked away with a greater perspective.

Clovis-Carver Public Library Discusses Lovely, Dark, Deep by Joyce Carol Oates

Lovely Dark Deep Discussion Questions:


Have you had any experiences similar to any characters in the stories

2. Did any of the stories change the way you think?

3. How do the main characters demonstrate significant character growth or decline?

4. How is the setting used to enhance the stories?

5. Which passage did you find particularly profound or interesting?

Meet the Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a contemporary American writer who is considered “One of the United States's most prolific (producing a lot of work) and versatile (producing a wide variety of work) contemporary writers, Joyce Carol Oates focuses upon the spiritual, sexual, and intellectual decline of modern American society”
-Encyclopedia of World Biography.

“Oates has established herself as a highly prolific scribe who has written dozens of books that include novels, short story collections, young adult fiction, plays, poetry and essays. Her first published book was the 1963 story collection By the North Gate, followed by her debut novel With Shuddering Fall in 1964.
     Other notable works among many include National Book Award winner them (1969), a layered chronicling of urban life that was part of Oates' Wonderland Quartet series, and her 26th novel We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), the story of an unraveling family which became an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection. The novels The Falls (2004) and The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007) were both New York Times bestsellers, while 2012's Patricide was published as an e-book novella. Oates has also written suspense novels under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.
     Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1978, Oates has won scores of awards over the course of her career, including the Prix Femina Etranger and the Pushcart Prize”.
- Bio.com

Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories is a 2015 Pulitzer Prize Finalist. To learn more about Joyce Carol Oates visit her website.

"Oates’ short stories are captivating, sad, compassionate, and haunting. They continue to capture the uncertainty, hurt, and darkness in all of us. Her fertile mind is our gain."

Libraries in Deming, Clovis, and Las Cruces are currently reading Lovely Dark, Deep, by Joyce Carol Oates.  Read along with us, join the conversation.  To help get you started, read the Washington Independent's Review of Lovely, Dark, Deep.

review/lovely-dark-deep-stories by the Washington Independent

Here are some of the questions we will be discussing at tomorrows get together at the Waymaker Christian Bookstore in Deming, NM. Give us some input on what you think of Lovely, Dark, Deep.

1. “Sex with a Camel” is a story with the most positive relationship in this collection. There’s a suggestion that there is something different about a relationship between a grandchild and grandparent and something special that these two characters share. How would you describe it? How did they both nurture the connection between them? What do you think of the symbolic meaning of the grandmother driving to the hospital and the grandson driving home?
2. . In “Sex with a Camel,” the story focuses on the boy taking his grandmother, who has cancer, to the hospital for treatment. At one point the boy thinks that he is “sick of his own sad story.” Do you think that there is more to his sad story than what we are reading about here?
3. “The Mastiff” is a suspenseful story with a high level of fear deliberately created. “If you are not afraid of much in life, you haven’t experienced life yet! There is much, much to be fearful of, though perhaps it is not a good idea to know this. The disasters that you might expect are not likely to happen, but others will, totally unexpected ones. Out of nowhere, they will come, and you will say, ‘but I had no idea’. That is the point: you have no idea. Just wait?” How does this attitude toward fear and the unknown resonate or not with you?
4. In “The Mastiff” the author made a conscious decision to refer to the two characters as “the woman” and “the man” though their names come up at some point. What do you think was the reason for that? Are they intended to be types or specific people? Did it engage you or distance you from the characters?
5. In “The Mastiff”  the main character, Mariella, is a single (never been married) woman about to turn 41, while in “The Hunter” the main character, Violet, is also a single (never been married) woman about to turn 40. One owns an art gallery and the other is a successful poet. Reading these two stories together, what do you think about how JCO presents these independent woman?
6. “The Hunter” has several threads running through it as opposed to, say,  “The Mastiff.” Oates brings in the underground railroad, an affair with a single middle aged poet and the President of a small college, the looming death of the woman’s father and an italicized incident of a homeless man biting her lip – a visible vulnerability. Why do you think Oates brought all these threads into the story? Do you think that she resolved them? How did this affect your sense of the story?
7. The opening couple of pages of “The Hunter” are a brilliant description of the setting-the college president’s historic mansion. How does this description of the setting skillfully lay the groundwork for the climax of the plot and the themes of the story?
8. The majority of short stories use the technique of flashback to inform the reader about what’s happened in the past of the story. In “The Disappearing” there is a nine page flashback to an incident that took place when the couple was young and newly married and they came home to find their house burglarized and they called the police. This is a lot of pages to devote to a flashback in a short story, so how is what we see in that flashback so crucial to this whole story? Do you feel it represented a turning point in their marriage?
9. “The Jesters” is a surreal account of a pivotal summer in the lives of an aging suburban couple where life seems to be falling apart as they knew it. Confronted by a mysterious, evolving  yet questionable presence, the “Jesters” become a foil for their lives as well as an active player in it.
   How did these “Jesters” bring into focus the character of the couple’s life together and the direction it is taking?
10. What do you make of the bizarre turn the story takes when the couple in “The Jesters” actually drive to the neighbors’ house to find it an abandoned wreck where an arson involving fatalities occurred some years back? Does this shift the story from what seemed like realism into a Ghost Story in this climatic scene?
11. Both “The Disappearing”  and  “The Jesters” are about empty nesters—two upper middle class couples who seem to be falling apart emotionally. The wife in “The Jesters” thinks: “She no longer made inquiries. Much of his life was separate from hers as if each was on an ice flow, drifting in the same direction yet drifting inevitably apart.” In “The Disappearing,” the wife thinks: “In marriage the most intense conversations were often with oneself.” What view of the empty nester marriage do you get from these two stories? How relevant does it seem that both couples seem to be from the same socio-economic class?

Lovely, Dark, Deep by Joyce Carol Oates, hosted by the Marshall Memorial Library-and Waymaker Bookstore

Reading and discussion of Lovely, Dark, Deep by Joyce Carol Oates at the Waymaker Christian Bookstore and Espresso Shop, Wednesday, June 22, at 10:00 am held at the Waymaker Christian Bookstore and Espresso Shop.   

To learn more about Lovely, Dark, Deep, check out NPR's Book Review.

Book Review by NPR

Joyce Carol Oates: Creating Characters

Joyce Carol Oates' characters are sometimes so vivid they live with you long after you've closed the book covers. Watch this video to learn how she approaches this work.

An Evening with Joyce Carol Oates

Some readers around New Mexico have been dipping into Joyce Carol Oates' stories for the first time, and may be wondering what the writer is like. Enjoy this video of Oates talking about writing and culture.

More Memes! Joyce Carol Oates Quotations

Because last week's were so much fun.

Meme Time! Joyce Carol Oates Quotations

It's Thursday and we're having a little fun with Lovely, Dark, Deep. What's your favorite quotation from the book? Tell us and we'll illustrate it for you.

What's the buzz?

Lovely Dark Deep is one of the more recently published Pulitzer titles on our list and it's still making quite a buzz. We turned to the boards at Goodreads to see what people had to say about it.

Reading this is like savoring several mini flutes of extravagant yet extremely diverse wines. :)

Why do I read JCO? 
Because she sizes me up, gouges my heart out, fillets it, and chomps it down. 
Because it is her heart, too. 

They are tragic, emotional, and realistic examples of life and suffering. That's what makes them so frightening because you can see yourself (or a family member/friend) living through the subject matter of each story.

What do you think about Lovely Dark Deep? Do the characters resonate with you? Tell us in the comments!

Short Stories: "Something of a Bum"

To call an American writer a master of the short story can be taken at best as faint praise, or at worst as an insult... (In Praise of the American Short Story)

Although he earned the highest praise for his short stories, John Cheever was the first to admit that this writing form is considered "something of a bum." Cheever was lucky enough to write (and thrive as a writer) during a time when scads of magazines published short fiction. But today, most of those literary periodicals have vanished, and short stories have come to be seen as preludes to "real" writing.

...I told non-writer friends that my book was a short story collection they were congratulatory but fervent in their expressed hopes that I would someday, finally, write a novel. (Let us Now Praise Famous Short Story Writers and Demand that They Write a Novel)

What does the short story offer that novels don't? One reviewer suggests that short stories are much more like life, where we glimpse the lives of others for a brief span, before the relentless tide of our lives sweeps us apart.  

The imperial ambitions of a certain kind of swaggering, self-important American novel — to comprehend the totality of modern life, to limn the social, existential, sexual and political strivings of its citizens — start to seem misguided and buffoonish. More of life is glimpsed, and glimpsed more clearly, through Barthelme’s fragments, Cheever’s finely ground lenses or the pinhole camera of O’Connor’s crystalline prose. 

As we move on from The Stories of John Cheever  to Joyce Carol Oates' collection, Lovely, Dark, Deep, it may help to keep in mind that these two art forms are separate but equal. The relationships a reader develops with a novel may be akin to becoming best friends, but in the words of one Pulitzer Dialogues participant,

You can not only meet acquaintances but also find lifelong friends in short stories. Or at least wonder about them for a long time.