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The Assignation (short story collection)

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The Assignation is a collection of 44 works of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates published by Ecco Press in 1988.[1]

The Assignation
First edition
AuthorJoyce Carol Oates
LanguageEnglish
PublisherEcco Press
Publication date
1988
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (hardback)
ISBN978-0-88001-200-3

Stories

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  • “One Flesh”
  • “Slow”
  • “The Boy”
  • “Sharpshooting”
  • “Tick”
  • “Photographer’s Model”
  • “Accident”
  • “Mule”
  • “A Touch of the Flu”
  • “Holiday”
  • “Éleuthérie"
  • “The Abduction”
  • “In Traction”
  • “Romance”
  • “Only Son”
  • “Bad Habits”
  • “Anecdote”
  • “The Quarrel”
  • “Pinch”
  • “Secret”
  • “Ace”
  • “Heartland”
  • “Maximum Security”
  • “The Assignation”
  • "Fin de siècle"
  • “The Bystander”
  • “Shelter”
  • “Party”
  • “Stroke”
  • “Adulteress”
  • “Superstitious”
  • “A Sentimental Encounter”
  • “Señorita"
  • “Face”
  • “August Evening”
  • “Picnic”
  • “Visitation Rights”
  • “Two Doors”
  • “Desire”
  • “Train”
  • “The Others”
  • “Blue-bearded Lover”
  • “Secret Observations of the Goat-Girl”
  • “The Stadium”

Reception

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Literary critic James Atlas in The New York Times reports that these stories—simply “narratives” according to Oates—possess “the peculiar virtues and defects of her distinctive voice.”[2]

Noting that few of the pieces exceed a “seven of eight pages,” Atlas registers this critique: “Too many of these stories seem like exercises or false starts. Some are so fragmentary that it's hard to get your bearings; the story's over before it's begun.”[3]

Kirkus Reviews also points to the brevity of the stories - “no more than two of three pages”[4] - which amount to mere “sketches” dealing almost exclusively with death and decay. The reviewer judges the collection “Vintage Oates—always interesting, though not always pleasant.”[5]

Publishers Weekly offered a mixed appraisal to the collection, observing that the fiction “offers brilliant bursts of energy that are both dazzling and disappointing for their ephemeral nature” but adding that the stories “reveal a master of the form writing at her efficient, full-tilt best.” The reviewer also pointed out the shortest of these narrative “ranging in length from a simple paragraph of five sentences to a dozen pages at most…”[6]

Critical assessment

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“In The Assignation, one of Oates’s two collections of ‘miniature narratives,’ such tales as “Blue-Bearded Lover” and “The Others" recall nineteenth-century Gothic literature, while others convey the kind of hothouse psychological intensity, the precarious balance between sanity and madness, traditionally associated with the genre.”[7]

Johnson adds that “With their brief, truncated scenes and their poetic intensity, they have a brutal, sometimes horrific impact, lying bare with deft economy and unflinching directness the anxieties, longings, and obsessions lying just beneath the surface of ‘ordinary’ life.”[8]

Though “sinister strangers,” appear in a number of these works, literary critic Gretchen Elizabeth Schultz cautions “that many of the stories in The Assignation...involve figures thoroughly familiar to the protagonists, family members for instance. In “Heartland,” a daughter visiting parents” whom she hasn’t seen in a very long time” is left wondering if she has ever really seen them at all (and if they have ever really seen her.” In “Bad Habits,” it is a wife who has trouble recognizing the husband “who squinted up at her without seeming to recognize her.”[9] Schultz traces the stories in The Assignation to Oates’s earliest literary efforts:

Readers of the rest of Oates’s work will not be surprised that many of the characters in [this] collection lose the selves they may or may not find again…other selves as have haunted Oates’s work and menaced the lives and psyches of her characters from the very start.[10]

References

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  1. ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 218-221: Selected Bibliography, Primary Works
  2. ^ Atlas, 1988: “Ms. Oates calls them ‘narratives’...and these ‘'narratives’ have the peculiar virtues and defects of her distinctive voice.”
  3. ^ Atlas, 1988: “Tantalizing in their brevity, these stories have the transient shock effects of a newspaper headline.”
  4. ^ Kirkus Reviews, 1988: “Most of the 44 stories collected here are very short—no more than two or three pages…”
  5. ^ Kirkus Reviews, 1988
  6. ^ Publishers Weekly, 1988
  7. ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 83
  8. ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 83
  9. ^ Schultz, 1994 p. 204: “...sinister strangers…” And p. 212: Notes, no. 4
  10. ^ Schultz, 1994 p. 203-204: Ellipsis inserted for brevity, meaning unaltered.

Sources

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