Sucking up space

The woman is a word plague/A literature Barbie doll/Nearly every damn journal/I subscribe to, she's there/Sucking up space

Fred Harrington, A Crawdad's Rhapsody

Now that's not very nice, is it? But I can appreciate the sentiment.

Joyce Carol Oates

Those lines above come from a poem called "The Quotients" by Fred Harrington, found in a collection of his poetry, The Crawdad's Rhapsody. Most of his poems are tender, sometimes beautiful. But everyone loses his temper sometimes, and this time Harrington's anger is directed at the prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates.

Oates writes books faster than many of us can read them, and short stories, plays, articles and poems besides. She has been doing this for decades. Now 85, an age at which most people have slowed down if not died, she continues to produce quality material. She has written at least 58 books. The Wikipedia article may be dated.

She has also written a number of mysteries under the name Rosamond Smith.

I have read relatively few of her books, the novel Black Water among them. I have liked what I have read, and there is one of her novels that I am itching to read now. Perhaps her massive output discourages me and others from reading her more than we do. Where do you start? How do you finish?

More seriously, however, her prolific career may impact her critical appreciation. She has won literary honors, to be sure, but the very number of her books makes it difficult for any of one book to stand out. She won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award, for example, yet Fitzgerald is revered for The Great Gatsby and perhaps Tender Is the Night. Literary critics can read all of his work in a brief period of time and compare one book against another. How could one do that with Oates?

The 19th century British author Anthony Trollope may be under appreciated for the same reason. As soon as he finished one novel, he started another and churned out books by the dozens. Scholars would much rather deal with Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy. 

And so Oates intimidates both readers and critics. As Fred Harrington observes in his poem, she also intimidates other writers. This "literary Barbie doll," as he calls her, sucks up the space.