Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates

Rating:
Summary: Maybe all that we need to know about Oates--or maybe not.
Review: Engrossing treatment of fascinating woman. Johnson treats her gently, but manages to create a well-rounded picture of a woman who has sparked off so much admiration, awe, contempt, envy and even hatred within the literary community alone; and who has been forced to mentally distance herself from her own public persona in order, it appears, to keep herself sane. Johnson uses as his central image the invisible woman -- invisibility the shield Oates attempts to retreat behind to live her rather placid, work-obsessed private life as Joyce Smith. While this division between public and private identities -- and the struggle to navigate the space between -- is hardly original,it did strike me as an effective and moving angle from which to view Oates. Oates has, in her career, fearlessly cut against the myth of woman writer (as someone who should concern herself with domestic life) and serious/great writer (someone who should produce one book every five or ten years). Johnson reveals a vicious underside of critics and writers who can't seem to deal with the phenomenon that is Oates without attacking/ belittling her on a personal level. Love her, hate her, or merely (god forbid) like her, Joyce Carol Oates appears to be a richly compelling presence in each of her two lives; and Invisible Writer is a rich, compelling read.

Rating:
Summary: a good, if somehow biased, visit to Oates' personal world
Review: I believe JCO is arguably the best writer to emerge in America in the second half of the 20th century. That said, I read this biography with much interest and found in it plenty of information about the elusive, invisible persona of JCO. However, as much as I appreciatted Mr.Johnson's obvious labour-of-love research and detailed account of the life and times of JCO, I found the whole thing somehow biased as a overly soft and timid portrait of a mysterious, enigmatic woman. I found many of the elements mentioned in the book suggested tremendously interesing points of entry into JCO's personal and psychological universe. None of them were explored. It seems like Mr.Johnson always stops at the threshold of the dark cave and then points his typewriter at some nice, peculiar social event. As I was reading, I felt Mr.Johnson limited his approach to recount little know facts with admirable accuracy and attention to detail, but reading any novel of JCO tells us more about her mind and soul that recounts of many dinner parties at Princeton. If you're interested in this wonderful writer, this book is surely helpful in reconstructing the outside of her life, and most interesting in its depiction of the inner workings of the literary world mafia, but I'd say very far from being the truly meaningful journey into JCO's mind that I'd like to read. I wouldn't like to discourage anyone interested in JCO to reads this, because it is a worthy and valuable read and Mr.Johnson deserves credit for taking on a difficult subject and rendering a never faltering narrative, but I believe JCO, and her readers, deserve even better (and specially braver) and will feel wanting for it. A good first look at this fascinating writer, sure, but she remains as invisible as she was before we opened this biography. Since JCO is after all still very much alive and kicking (her last BLONDE proves she as good as ever or even better), maybe it is a matter of time and perspective. Maybe Mr.Johnson himself, given time and distance, will offer us a deeper reading of JCO. He is surely an able writer and a keen researcher. I'll surely be there to check all the fascinating stuff about one of my favorite authors that this time, somehow, proved invisible, but smellable.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I looked forward to reading a biography of this important writer. Instead, I felt as if I was reading literary criticsm. Mr. Johnson had incredible access to Oates, via journals and interviews. Instead of using this access to bring us vibrant insight into the process of creation as Oates brings a book from idea to the page, we get pages of dense literary analysis jumping back in forth in time within one page. Perhaps I need to read the Reader's Digest version...

Rating:
Summary: a good, if somehow biased, visit to Oates' personal world
Review: I read this book over the weekend and I couldn't put it down. During my college class in English literature, I first discovered Joyce Carol Oates and her special style of writing. Her talent overpowers and this biography explains her passion for writing. The candid photographs in the center of the book show how her drive consumes her bodily as well as spiritually. Greg Johnson explores her novels and tells how they come from her personal experiences of life and her family. Even though her own parents seemed rather doting and conventional, her grandparents certainly led a bizarre and violent life. Joyce takes childhood memories of her school life in a one room environment and expands the events into another painful experience of growing up and early adolescence. Joyce expresses that eating to her is not important; she feels that writing sustains her enough. But she complicates her life with eating because it is necessary. Her life is filled with another tortuous phy! ! sical problem caused by her own arrhythmic heart. It seems like she constantly battles against her own body and sometimes loses in the encounters. I enjoyed the personal information, explaining her works and today I went to my local library to search for "Wonderland." But they have 58 of her works and no "Wonderland." The author details the main character in this novel, "Jesse Vogel." So since my maiden name is Vogel, I was determined to find out more about this character with my family name. The author explains most of her novels and writings in this biography and reading about them makes you want to discover the many talents that Joyce Carol Oates brings to us through her devoted passion to writing and her immense talent. The Invisible Writer shows us how one person can bring so many characters alive through her works and yet want to remain as much as possible in the background. She speaks in her writings and her writings show us the wor! ! ld as no one else can.

Rating:
Summary: Very Readable Biography, Yet JCO Still Mysterious to Me
Review: Invisible Writer is throughly researched and well written. I found it very readable, even though I was not a fan of JCO's. I'm still not a fan of hers. Greg Johnson manages to create a fair portrait of JCO as a human who is sometimes prickly and vain. I understand other reviewers' comments that he's too soft on her, but I see it as him being careful to be fair in writing about someone who is still producing some of her best work. Oddly I didn't find that his treatment made her more likeable, only that it made JCO someone with whom I can empathize.

After reading this book, the greatest question remaining about JCO is the violence, especially sexual, in her work. A childhood sexual incident is mentioned, but it seems rather mundane. Johnson refers to some of the hardships suffered by JCO's family, but those hardships doesn't seem to explain well enough how this quiet, intellectual woman lives in such another world in her writer's imagination. Perhaps that's the intrigue of JCO.

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating biography of an enigmatic, brilliant novelist.
Review: This biography exhaustively plumbs the life and career of Joyce Carol Oates. Although not a biography I would normally seek out, since I've read only a few of her books, "Invisible Writer" was named a "Best Academic Book of the Year" by the American Library Association and received glowing reviews, so I was curious about its content. I was immediately taken in by this sweeping, thoughtful, and superbly written account of a consummate writer's writer. Although Johnson does not shrink from criticizing his subject--her controlling behavior, her tendency to depict "friends" in her fiction in unflattering ways, even an occasional veiled threat of revenge to an unfriendly reviewer--he presents on the whole a fair, balanced portrait of a writer for whom art is almost her entire life. This should be read by anyone interested in writing or writers.