Book Review: "Cardiff, by the Sea" by Joyce Carol Oates

“Live like it’s your life.”

- Cardiff, by the Sea by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is quite possibly one of the finest writers of the past fifty years and has had a great range of novels to lend her name to. Apart from her novels though are her short stories. Now, I have always loved investigating her short stories - I have reviewed them often. 'Zero-Sum' was probably not her best but 'The Doll Master and Tales of Terror' was brilliant. This book named 'Cardiff, By the Sea' is a little bit different in the fact that it is a book of four short novellas rather than just short stories. They are well-written and in a classic Joyce Carol Oates style, deal with a woman's struggle in the world and how they have to bear the brunt of everyone else's bad decisions - including those of men. It is one of her better books in my opinion - every problem is rubbed raw and revealed to the reader as a series of sad vignettes.

The title story is about a woman who receives a phone call telling her she has an inheritance - but the problem is that she is adopted. Small psychological steps get her around to meeting her great aunts and uncles, trying to find out who her parents were. This novella is great, but possibly not my favourite out of the whole thing - that belongs to a different one which I can honestly say really does make the text what it is. This one is more about setting the atmosphere for strangeness which will continue throughout.

The second story deals with a girl who is getting older and turning into an adolescent as she views the world as not going her way. She is mad at her mother, she is mad at her father for leaving, she is mad at her friends who seem not to care about her in the way that friends should, she is mad about the people at school who are brutal and uncaring, she is mad - at everything. As she tries to search for herself in the grim of her life, she comes across a feral cat, a white one. And even though the sense of a white feral cat gives off the symbolism of an angel, this cat symbolises something profound and possibly terrible for the girl and her futures. Joyce Carol Oates turns the ordinary extraordinary in this wonderous tale of misadventure. It is simply brilliant and so clever.

The next story is about a nineteen-year-old humanties undergraduate who entangles herself with two men who are both narcissists. She is a bright and yet, naive woman - she is lonely and so gets involved with the worst people possible. As we know from Joyce Carol Oates' stories and novels, when bright women become involved with men, things go wrong for them and them alone. I loved the way that Oates wrote in character flaws for every single character - including our main character. The investigations into misogyny that Oates produces are terrifying and even though they seem slow starting at first, they climb pretty quickly. It is truly a great achievement of her writing.

Another story deals with a boy called Stefan who's mother killed his sister and then killed herself. Stefan now has a new stepmother and she is starting to complain about how she can see things happening around the house. She is becoming haunted by the brilliance of the first wife. Echoing that strange folklorish idea of the step-mother but changing it so that we have a brutish and evil mother instead. The step-mother's main priority seems to be protecting Stefan as much as she can, but it is clear that she is descending into a kind of madness. It is a brilliantly written story and is possibly my favourite in the whole anthology. I love these psychological ghost stories that you don't really know whether they are ghost stories because there are so many questions.

All in all, I think that Joyce Carol Oates has given us something to muster over in this anthology. Clearly inspired by Shirley Jackson and her short stories, Joyce Carol Oates does an absolutely brilliant job at creating a psychologically maddening atmosphere - an achievement and clearly one of her most underrated piece of fiction.