Name: Arnold Friend and the Rest
Item: High lonesome
Author: green_light

High lonesome →

by Joyce Carol Oates

Arnold Friend and the Rest

green_light

Jul 9, 2024 8:17 AM

One of the first adjectives that springs to mind when talking about Joyce Carol Oates is prolific. High Lonesome, New and Selected Stories, 1966-2006 is therefore, despite its impressive amount of pages for a short story collection, not a complete replication of Oates’ efforts in the medium. Instead it features a selection of short stories from each decade of her career - though excluding any excursions into what might be labelled as gothic or even plain horror fiction - as well as, at the time, previously unpublished work from the then newly arrived 21st century.

An issue any writer committed to appearing so consistently productive is that, inevitably, not every work is a masterpiece. Such a writer does not slave away at a single project for a decade at a time, satisfied to produce in their lifetime a handful of texts ready to be accepted easily into the literary canon. No, for better or worse, Oates clearly loves the act of writing and has no intention to tie herself down to one idea. The short stories in reflect this, ranging in quality despite the fact that the collection is curated and that many stories have already been weeded out. That is not to say that any story in is strictly bad - though I found the story ‘*BD* 11 1 87’ to be particularly unimpressive - but that it was common in my reading experience to go from reading a story that was merely alright into one I considered a masterpiece and then again back into one that was alright.

An in-depth review of every story in the collection would constitute a burgeoning novel in its own right, so I will stick to singling out stories in High Lonesome that I felt were particularly striking and worth reading. Therefore a reader new to Oates, or one simply looking for more from her, will know what to keep an eye out for in the future even if High Lonesome is too great an investment to make. These stories are ‘The Fish Factory’, ‘Small Avalanches’, ‘Last Days’, ‘Heat’, and ‘Mark of Satan’.

Having said that I wouldn’t give in-depth reviews, I would like to make one exception: the story ‘Where Are Going, Where Have You Been?’. A lot has been said of it since its original publication in 1966 and this brief overview is unlikely to tread any new ground, but I’d still like to say my piece. The story follows a teenage girl, Connie, on the cusp of a more adult life, enjoying her summer days hanging out far away from home with her friends. The kind of idyllic, responsibility-free summer that any reader can remember, or at least imagine easily enough. All that changes when a visitor calls to the house one day when she is home alone. The visitor, introduced as Arnold Friend, only wants one thing: Connie herself. The threat of violence is not made explicit but hangs over the encounter all the same as Arnold convinces Connie through the kitchen screen door to leave the house of her own free will in what is to my mind one of the most compelling and memorable scenes in literature. The story has stayed with me in the years since I first read it, and remains one of my go-to examples of the power of the short story as an artistic medium. If you decide to read only one Joyce Carol Oates story in your life then let it be this one. You don’t even have to pay for it, the North Dakota State University has the text uploaded online and can be easily accessed through a Google search.