On June 16th, The Hogarth Press published The Frenzy: Stories, Joyce Carol Oates’s 49th collection. The aforesaid day, “America’s foremost pistillate of letters” posted and reposted 40 unusual times connected X, commenting on, among different things, Dick Cavett, tiger lilies, cats, and, repeatedly, constabulary brutality. A measurement of exceptional abbreviated stories, The Frenzy has already received appreciative reviews, yet Oates’s tweets volition apt garner much attention. With astir 200,000 followers, the celebrated writer commands a societal media assemblage that usually exceeds her speechmaking public.
Stephen King (6.7 million), Margaret Atwood (1.7 million), Gary Shteyngart (487,000), and a fewer different novelists person much followers connected X—bots included—than Oates. Yet Oates has a acold greater endowment for going viral connected the progressively blimpish societal media site. In 2022, critics condemned Oates for her infamous tweet asserting the unrecognized worth of “young achromatic antheral writers… who may, successful fact, beryllium brilliant, & captious of their ain ‘privilege.’” Three years later, she basked successful online acclaim for a brutal takedown of Elon Musk, the archetypal of respective critiques.
“So funny that specified a affluent antheral ne'er posts thing that indicates that helium enjoys oregon is adjacent alert of what virtually everyone appreciates,” wrote Oates. “The poorest persons connected Twitter whitethorn person entree to much quality & meaning successful beingness than the ‘most affluent idiosyncratic successful the world.’” Offering scrollers and twitterers a lively substance of snark, wit, and empathy, Oates consistently attracts an enviable fig of views.
Not to everyone’s liking, of course. Troubled by immoderate aboriginal tweets, Gawker’s Michelle Dean urged the deletion of @JoyceCarolOates, while Lit Hub’s Eric Thurm disquieted that the posts would detract from Oates’s literate reputation. Recently, the writer’s anti-MAGA posts person garnered praise with Sophie Lee of Culture Magazine dubbing Oates a “Gen Z Twitter meme” and Mary Kate Carr of AV Club celebrating her arsenic possibly the astir unsafe “gunslinger” successful the chaotic West of X.
But what of Oates’s fiction? How bash her astir 1 100 novels and collections carnivore upon her online celebrity? Oates’s “social feed” is not her “greatest publication to literature,” arsenic the Guardian’s Patrick Lenton cheekily claims, but her penning whitethorn person informed her astonishing Internet popularity. Like truthful galore 21st-century posters and influencers, Oates has agelong recovered successful troubling quality the worldly integral to her work. The National Book Award-winnng them (1969) depicts the Detroit riots of 1967; Black Water (1992) draws connected the Chappaquiddick incident; Zombie (1995) is based connected the communicative of serial slayer Jeffrey Dahmer; Blonde (2000) reimagines the beingness and decease of Marilyn Monroe; and Sacrifice (2015) centers connected the Tawana Brawley case. Long earlier Twitter and Instagram, Oates devoted herself to the graphic practice of unsettling figures and events.
This impulse to gully on—and sometimes fuel—public contention continues successful The Frenzy, not with the fictionalization of a header story, but with the practice of a much nebulous phenomenon: the situation of selfhood successful the integer age. With this volume, arsenic successful caller publications similar “Subaqueous” (2021) and “This is Not a Drill” (2023), Oates highlights the dispiriting effects of exertion connected modern life, calling our attraction to the alienation and anomie endemic to our cell-phone era. Yet, possibly unsurprisingly, the literate queen of X besides emphasizes that machine platforms person nary peculiar assertion connected quality self-destruction. For each their ubiquity, Oates indicates that these devices are hardly the lone origin of our problems.
Oates doesn’t indulge successful the predictable condemnation of societal media. She whitethorn person claimed that Twitter is “largely a discarded of time,” but she besides recognizes that we sometimes scapegoat exertion to debar confronting our ain limitations and failures.
The titular communicative suggests arsenic much. The frenzy cited alludes to protagonist Matthew Cassidy’s acquisition witnessing a cannibalistic orgy of food disconnected the New England seashore (“writhing silvery bodies successful the acheronian water, savagely feeding”) but it’s not hard to recognize the bloody country arsenic an allegory for the viciousness of American capitalism. Keenly attune to economical inequality—her novels attest to this—Oates knows afloat good that successful our nine the large food usually devour the small.
This penetration besides applies to the frenzied satellite of X, but Oates doesn’t indulge successful the predictable condemnation of societal media. She whitethorn person claimed that Twitter is “largely a discarded of time,” but she besides recognizes that we sometimes scapegoat exertion to debar confronting our ain limitations and failures. Dedicated to his ain midlife crisis, Matthew has nary qualms astir cheating with Brianna, the nineteen-year-old girl of household friends, but helium finds objectionable her inability to halt “scrolling done emails. Or Instagram, TikTok,” and perpetrate herself to their Jersey Shore tryst.
Furious that Brianna seems to person forgotten his “very existence, wholly immersed successful her damned phone,” Matthew throws his young lover’s iPhone into the ocean. Brianna treats this enactment arsenic a implicit betrayal, and she responds successful kind. Yet Oates hardly suggests that we should broadside with Matthew. His tendency to beryllium “off the grid,” similar his assertive effect to Brianna’s behavior, reveals acold much astir his selfishness than it does his captious narration to connection technology. In this story—perhaps Oates’s finest abbreviated fabrication since “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” (1966)—the compartment telephone serves not truthful overmuch arsenic an obstacle to meaningful quality transportation arsenic a reflector reflecting a middle-aged man’s infidelity.
Oates’s fascination with dynamics of aforesaid and different persists successful “The Fear,” a wrenching communicative astir Janette and Juliet, 2 adjacent identical cousins, the second of whom develops jaw crab and past has aggregate surgeries. The rubric of the communicative refers to the fearfulness of carnal quality that underwrites demonization and violence. As the narrator puts it erstwhile describing the absorption of teenage boys to Juliet’s atypical face, her rima and oculus marked by aggregate operations: “Like looking into a mirror. Seeing successful your ain (familiar) look thing profoundly unfamiliar, unexpected. Unfathomable.” Terror implicit the vagaries of quality embodiment leads to mob-like behavior, and Oates is, arsenic usual, extraordinarily delicate to the brutal attraction of young women successful modern America. Centering chiefly connected however Janette wrestles with her nonaccomplishment to judge her sick cousin, this beautifully crafted communicative asks america to see however we cull the different successful a panic implicit our ain alterity. “The Fear” teaches the scholar that deep-rooted quality anxieties implicit being seen and objectified, isolated and dissected, beryllium wrong and without the satellite of integer technology.
Oates is besides precise overmuch alert of the loneliness of modern life, and she comments successful assorted stories connected what it means for humans to interact chiefly done compartment phones. Maud, the first-person narrator of “The Return,” understands that her widowed person Audra yearns for existent contact, to “not talk astatine her, coolly detached arsenic successful an email” but to “speak with her.” Seeing idiosyncratic “on a machine screen, successful an email oregon substance message, had nary ringing of intimacy,” Maud informs the reader. Indeed, if 1 reads “The Return” successful airy of Oates’s agelong acquisition with X, the communicative seems to connote that the solipsism of a satellite babelike connected online connection needfully leads to the hopeless request for designation emblematic of societal media.
Yet Oates besides makes evident that immoderate effort to flight this dilemma is doomed to failure. In “The Refuge,” Marcus, a self-loathing techie intolerant of his woman Lorene’s involvement successful computers, goes “off the grid” successful hunt of enlightenment. He visits a section Buddhist shrine, but alternatively of uncovering contented and peace, helium ends up mentally unstable, and past homicidal. For Marcus, jettisoning “idiotic devices similar compartment phones” degenerates into thing acold worse than the isolation and cruelty of online culture: the quality capableness for carnal violence. In the satellite of “The Refuge,” the viciousness of adjacent the nastiest station pales earlier the terrifying imaginable of bloodletting.
Throughout The Frenzy, Oates doesn’t truthful overmuch indict arsenic effort to apprehend, dialectically, our civilization of compartment phones and societal media, of Apple and X. She forces the scholar to confront, similar Matthew, the discomfiting world that our usage of—and effect to—technology says importantly much astir america than it does the bundle and hardware integral to our lives. Digital culture, adjacent oligarch-controlled integer culture, isn’t the problem; it’s what quality beings accidental connected and done platforms that is for Oates the existent origin for concern. Machines are lone what we marque of them, and, acknowledgment to this talented writer, we are reminded that sometimes we tin marque them talk subversively indeed.
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