By Joyce Carol Oates. No one, not even Lawrence, has so given the novel over to extreme states of feeling. She writes from within psyches that are like prehistoric organisms, creatures all spines and terrible soft undersides, engaging in love that is like hatred, combat that is like love, mercifully separating, re- engaging. . . .
Oates is a potent myth-maker in the drag guise of a social naturalist.
She releases the stuff of nightmares in the raw streets of Detroit. She rows in the rapids of hunger. But where the latter give us poetic universes shot through with desire, Oates makes psychology swallow everything. Descriptions of sensations , her novels are fiercely claustrophobic, and you experience them like a privileged sickness. Oates imagines so deeply from within the aboriginal core that physical scenes are like irritating films on the eyeball, social questions largely words out there , surprising when they seem to be one's own.