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I AM NO ONE YOU KNOW is the most recent collection of previously published short stories by Joyce Carol Oates. This latest assortment consists of nineteen tales that range from "In Hiding," a creepy tale about the one mistake a person might make in the spirit of generosity that will ultimately bring danger to her/him, to a very charming tale about two friends who happen upon Marilyn Monroe in the famous Strand bookstore in Manhattan. The body of work produced by Ms. Oates is outstanding for its range of topics and its breadth of forms. Her stories are so intense that they immediately grab readers and keep them reading.
But more than that, Oates leaves her reader reeling from the way she handles her characters, settings, dialogue, descriptions and on points timeliness. "In Hiding" begins as a pleasant story about a divorced poet/teacher/translator who lives with her teenage son in upstate New York. One day she receives a packet of poetry and prose from a stranger.
"Please accept my poetry as a gift. I love your poetry truly. Even if you don't have time to read my writings. Even if you don't have a feeling for it. I understand. His name was Woodson Johnston, Jr. --- 'Woody.' He was an inmate at Kansas State Penitentiary in Fulham, Kansas." She read the poems and the few diary entries he had sent: "She'd given in to impulse [and] mailed off [a thank you] card, and that was that!" But of course it isn't.
"Three Girls" is a "typical" New York story, with two students, "NYU girl-poets drifting through the warehouse of treasures as through an enchanted forest, known to them as Strand Used Books on Broadway and Twelfth [during a] snowy March [evening]
in 1956." In their giddiness among the great books stacked in mile-high piles, one of them glances up and sees "an individual
pulling down books
a woman nearly my height
in a man's navy coat to her ankles and with sleeves past her wrists, a man's beige fedora hat on her head, scrunched low
and most of her hair hidden by the hat." At first the storyteller is unable to place this woman who is so deep in the study of the tomes she's pulling off the shelves. "The blond woman turned, taking down another book from the shelf, and I saw that she was Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe. In the Strand. Just like us. And she seemed to be alone. Marilyn Monroe, alone!"
Still unrecognized, she appeared to be a book junkie just like the other customers. But by 1956, "Marilyn Monroe had entered history, and there was no escape from it." Or was there?
Of the nineteen stories, the third that is especially noteworthy is "The Mutants." In this truly realistic and timely tale, a young woman who seems to have been "touched by the angels" has moved from her Midwestern home to New York City. She is blond, beautiful and loved by all who know her. She lives in a gorgeous apartment with a breathtaking view, she is engaged to be married and "
as always on weekday mornings her fiancι left the apartment early. She'd gone out shortly after 8 a.m. to a nearby Kinko's to pick up a color
manuscript (of a children's book) and she was crossing
[the street]
when she heard a droning noise at first annoying and then alarming as of a gargantuan hornet and when she looked up she saw a sight so unnerving her eyes at first refused to decode it; an airplane, a commercial airliner, enormous, flying unnaturally low, careening out of the sky and of her stunned vision behind a bank of buildings as, in the next instant, she was thrown to her knees on the pavement by a colossal explosion
she fell, slivers of glass were pelting her exposed skin
yet her reflexes were
rapid
and in nearly the same second in which she heard [another] explosion
she was running into
her building
past individuals stunned" [into frozen beings.] When she reaches the sanctuary of her apartment, at first she thinks she's in a daydream until she realizes "she was beginning to breathe strangely. Her mouth was coated with a fine dry dust
why was it so dark? The sky had vanished."
She hesitates and is confused and really doesn't know what to do. Should she try to get out, or should she stay? Was she the only person left inside --- was she the last person alive? Her psyche is too overwhelmed; she is incapable of making a decision about what to do. Her paralysis in the face of what feels like an apocalyptic event is a fascinating character study and reminds us, again, what 9/11 did to our country and our people.
The remaining sixteen stories that comprise I AM NO ONE YOU KNOW are as moving, thrilling, frightening, amusing and economical as these. Joyce Carol Oates stands as one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Her canvas is painted with a wide variety of subjects: boxing, religion, murder, politics, relationships, law, health, morality, rage, suburbanites and city dwellers. Her overreaching and kaleidoscopic talent embraces the American scene and its populace. The stories in this collection are a pastiche of the themes, style and versatility of subject that has marked her career as a writer.
She has said that "all of us who write work out of conviction that we are participating in some sort of communal activity
[understand that] in general the writing writes itself." Only an artist who is confident in her work and ideas could make a statement of such sweeping proportions. In her art Joyce Carol Oates has reached far beyond the realm of the ordinary, and in so doing has created a body of work that will endure.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum
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