Dimensions
135 x 203 x 24mm
This collection from an unparalleled critic of non-fiction brings together diverse and provocative pieces from the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, and the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW.
Oates states in her introduction, 'The "rough country" of my title has a double meaning: it refers to both the treacherous geographical/ psychological terrains of the writers who are my subjects -- Flannery O'Connor, Shirley Jackson, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, Margaret Atwood among others-and also the emotional terrain of my life following the unexpected death of my husband Raymond Smith in February 2008 after forty-eight years of marriage.
As literature is a traditional solace to the bereft, so writing about literature can be a solace to the bereft, as it was to me during the days, weeks, and months when the effort of writing fiction often seemed beyond me, as if belonging to another lifetime when I'd been younger, more resilient and reckless. Overnight everything seemed to change for me, and inside me -- the death of a 'loved one' is a universal experience yet, to the bereaved, it is singular as a mountain thundering downhill in an avalanche that swallows you up utterly, batters your brain and fills your mouth with rubble. I could compose short stories -- slowly and painstakingly -- with perhaps one-tenth of the efficiency I'd formerly taken for granted-bizarre and surreal stories about loss, grief, 'surviving' -- but I have not been able to imagine anything so ambitious as a novel, even a short novel. Like a person whose vision has become blurred following a blow to the head, I can't seem to see beyond the relatively brief span of the short story.
Reading and taking notes, especially late at night when I can't sleep, has been the solace, for me, that saying the rosary or reading The Book of Common Prayer might be for another."
Through these balanced and illuminating essays we see Oates at the top of her form, engaged with forebears and contemporaries, providing clues to her own creative process: 'For prose is a kind of music: music creates "mood." What is argued on the surface may be but ripples rising from a deeper, subtextual urgency.'
