Book Review: "Zero-Sum" by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is probably best known for her darker fiction. Her air of mystique comes from presenting the ordinary as something to be afraid of. The theme of, you don't really know your neighbours, pervades throughout her fiction from her short stories all the way to her novel The Babysitter. Very recently, I found myself reading a book of her short stories which seemed incredibly recent in its writing (though I regret I didn't look up when it was written and still haven't). The book was called The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror. The normal is made to look abnormal, uncanny valley is brought in as reality and normality shift around and make everything seem askew and discordant. This is what she does best and out of most authors, she also does it the best.

There may be, as in many of her anthologies, only a few stories littered about them but that does not make them any lesser. She is a master of craft and each short story has something to respect about it. For example, in The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, the story entitled Soldier may not be the best thing I have ever read, but the execution cannot be ignored as being masterful. When it comes to storytelling in Zero-Sum though, I don't think the storytelling and the craft quite lives up to the last anthology I read by her, but it sure is up there with being one of the most well-written anthologies I have read this year.

The first story, Zero-Sum is about a young girl who becomes strangely obsessed with winning the favour of her mentor and then she meets the daughter of this professor. Woven in with philosophical thoughts, it really presents the main character (a philosophy student) as being the direct centre of this mind-bending and cleverly written story. Whereas the second story is about a bunch of high school girls who decide to punish sexual predators in their area through an advert.

The one I found really dry was called The Suicide. It is about a man who is fixated on suicide and has these moments of dry humour along with it. He starts to become obsessed with his own death and though he has a wife and quite a nice life in comparison to lots of people, he also continues with his writing. He tries to think about his legacy and how people will think about him after he has died, even stating at one point whether they think his death was cause by a bad review. It was a bit too David Foster Wallace for me and I am not a huge David Foster Wallace fan (everything apart from The Pale King was utter rubbish, there I said it). Strangely enough, many readers think that this one is the masterpiece of the whole anthology - the one that kind of holds it up.

Personally, it wasn't for me - it felt like it dragged on about the same thing for too long; it got repetitive and dry very quickly. It would have been more interesting if the man actually had some hardship going on in his life in a way that maybe a Hemingway character does - psychological exhaustian from PTSD. But no, it was just David Foster Wallace rubbish again - as it really always is in the modern day.

Many of the other stories were pretty good with an underlying theme of girls and their psychological histories (which is why I thought it weird to include a story like The Suicide here). Mr Stickum was probably my favourite story in the anthology because it lets on to a very direct plot where you can actually support the characters. In The Suicide for example: I just could not experience the character for any longer or I might have done the same thing. Monstersister was also a great story - about a girl that discovers there is a weird growth on her head happening, it is a classic Joyce Carol Oates story of the weird happening in the world of the plain.

All in all, though I liked some stories in the anthology, others were not so great and since the longest story in the anthology was The Suicide, it is definitely losing some marks here.