The current bonanza is unusual even for Oates, who has just published her 94th book, “Middle Age: A Romance.” Her recent Oprah pick, “We Were the Mulvaneys,” was the author’s first No. 1 best seller and has sold 10 times more than any other book she’s written. And having historically appealed to a narrower readership, she’s now tapping into audiences all over the culture: from the millions of members of Oprah’s often less-than-literary book club and the CBS audience who watched “Blonde” to mystery fans to uppity critics. Thirty-one years ago that last crowd bestowed on her a National Book Award for her fourth novel, “them.” Since then she’s been mauled by the critics. Unlike workers in every other profession, Oates is actually faulted for her productivity and assumed to be a hack. But the 63-year-old is not complaining. “It’s not like I was dragged into an alley and beaten.”
Besides, the naysayers are fewer and fewer. “She’s older now,” says her longtime editor, Daniel Halpern. “Instead of abusing her, people are realizing she’s a national treasure.” Novelist Russell Banks, a friend of Oates’s, thinks talk about her output got plain boring: " ‘No duh’ is what you want to say to that." As a result, he says, people are now noticing the quality of the work. “After a while, you just have to take your hat off.” In fact, there was speculation last year about a Nobel Prize. Banks believes that “there’s no living American novelist who’s as likely to get it.”
Her new novel only increases her odds for that international literary lifetime-achievement award. “Middle Age: A Romance” takes place in a fictitious affluent New York town, Salthill-on-Hudson, where no one is very young anymore. Adam Berendt, a 53-year-old mediocre sculptor, dies saving a drowning child, leaving behind a mysterious stash of assets and a slew of grieving women, all of whom, it turns out, were in love with him. His demise unleashes a rash of personal crises in the community. But your typical midlife variety would have been too blah for Oates. Instead, a woman stalks her 14-year-old son, then puts off suicide because of social obligations; a husband cheats on his wife, and his wife’s dogs kill him; a man has an affair with an unattractive paralegal and raises their love child himself. “People will ask, ‘How long did it take you to write these 600 pages?’ " says Oates. To which she replies: “It’s taken your whole life, because everything you are is in it.”
For the first time, Oates steeps something as mundane as suburban boomers in her usual gothic brew. The result is both hilarious and mournful, a romantic comedy that’s been dragged through the mud–and probably her most commercial story yet. She doesn’t seem to fuss over writing beautiful sentences (you might wonder, for instance, how lines like “Overnight his dreams were engorged with her” made the cut), but her realism is laced with suspense, her mastery of storytelling on full display. If Oates is her same over-the-top self–italicizing, exclaiming, air-quoting, having fun with fonts–she keeps this drama grounded and relevant. Probably because, for this book, she borrowed heavily from the the leafy social milieu of Princeton. For Adam Berendt’s rational detachment, she drew from herself. She says, “It’s emotional autobiography.”
When she’s not appearing in her own pages, you can find her in the same modest “contemporary” home in Princeton where she’s lived with her husband since 1978. To get there, you follow the hand-drawn map she faxes you, the streets drawn gracefully on the diagonal. Drive out past the Educational Testing Service, past the part of the map she’s labeled “countryside” in brackets, to where her house crouches among sparse woods in full view of her neighbors. There’s one Honda parked under the carport.
In a bright blue T shirt and shorts, she’s waiting at the door when you arrive five minutes early. She’s light on her feet like a fairy and whisks you out to the back patio, where you ask her–one last time–how on earth does she do it all? “I don’t see myself as prolific in any existential way,” she says. “Someone else would say ‘You’ve written 600 short stories,’ but to me that’s just statistical.” In addition to those statistics, there are unpublished manuscripts stashed away that she’s lost track of. Some are actually in drawers. A man with AIDS, who heard about one, wrote her asking if she could please publish it before he died. “I had to say, ‘I can’t publish it until I rewrite it, but I’m not emotionally ready to rewrite it’.”
Wistful and shy, she’ll look away from you when she finishes a sentence, as if acting out one of the ellipses she so often uses in her writing. She says her life lately has felt extraordinary, but only in a traumatic way, since her father died and her mother entered a health-care facility. “Since [then] I don’t have much feeling for aspects of my career that might have made them very happy,” she says.
Sometimes she shrugs her small shoulders like a girl, and you sense her potential to flirt. Regularly she pushes her wispy hair off her face, seeming to relish the grand feminine gesture like an aging movie star. You can see where all the breathless drama is born. To facilitate her urgency to tell stories, she once tried a word processor, but she had to get rid of it because it was too addictive. “With a typewriter you can look out the window. A word processor is sort of thrilling because it’s like seeing into your own brain. The infinite possibilities are absolutely fascinating, if you’re an obsessive personality, which I suppose I am. James Joyce would still be writing ‘Finnegans Wake’ if he had a word processor.”
Written on the typewriter, “Middle Age: A Romance” does come to an end, a rather happy one. Perhaps this typically macabre writer is feeling more hopeful. When she walks you to your car, she tells you how she loves to dance around the house, how sometimes the music she dances to is in her head. The last you see of her, she’s scampering into the house, her hair flying. There’s more work to be done.
