The shape of our despair: the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates.

Is Joyce Carol Oates the Great American Novelist? Critics in the United States and Europe have called her a genius. The literary honors keep piling up (including a National Book Award and two nominations for the Nobel Prize), and she enjoys popular appeal as well as critical acclaim. Several of her novels have been made into films, while We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), chronicling a family coming apart in the aftermath of a daughter's rape, became an Oprah pick and a number-one bestseller. Hers is an oeuvre celebrated for its quality and envied for its quantity. There is little doubt that Oates, born in 1938 and the author of more than eighty books, is a penetrating observer of the American scene. In her novels and short stories, and to a lesser extent in her essays and poems, she has encompassed a broad range of American experience, nimbly crossing lines of class and color to explore how national myths and longings (wanting to be Marilyn or DiMaggio, wanting to date a Kennedy) clash against the daily cruelties of lived life. Her captivating narratives take readers into the minds of movie stars (Blonde) and serial killers (Zombie), and even of ordinary working-class men and women (Wonderland, You Must Remember This, and countless others). Above all she is known for depicting the darker impulses of human nature--sex and violence, and the lust for power that lurks behind both. Violence saturated such acclaimed early novels as Them and Wonderland, provoking Geoffrey Wolff to write a 1971 review titled "Miss Oates Loves to Splash Blood on Us." Nearly two decades later, Oates's perceptive--and enthusiastic--meditations on America's favorite blood sport won her wide praise for On Boxing. The brutal, even lurid potentials of working-class American life are an enduring preoccupation of her fiction.

Oates is also one of the sharpest appraisers of America's upper-middle class, an aspect of her work that has gone underappreciated. The upper-middle class is this novelist's own, the one to which she has risen from a hardscrabble rural background in upstate New York, thanks to her success as a writer and academic (Oates has taught at Princeton for years). This largely suburban world is populated by the managers, intellectuals, consultants, scientists, writers, and other professionals who supply ideas, money, and legitimacy to the existing social order, and Oates seemingly knows it inside out.

Two novels in particular demonstrate her sure grasp of the professional/academic elite, its habits and mindset. Both American Appetites (1989) and Middle Age: A Romance (2001) are set in imagined communities ("Hazelton-on-Hudson" and "Salthill-on-Hudson"), secluded, prestigious places within reach of New York City. With a satirist's eye, Oates scrutinizes the ambitions and the values of the self-defining meritocratic class that inhabits these exalted zip codes. Ian McCullough, the protagonist of American Appetites, is a demographics analyst, senior fellow at a social science research institute, and editor of a journal of international politics. His wife, Glynnis, is a food expert, an author of "regional and ethnic cookbooks of uncommon originality and pictorial beauty." Ian puts in long hours on research projects and papers for conferences, in addition to fielding "those dispiriting, because so frequent, requests from former students, former colleagues, former friends, for letters of recommendation (for university positions, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, National Endowment fellowships, and the rest)." Glynnis distinguishes herself by publishing articles in glossy magazines like Gourmet and orchestrating showy, elaborate meals and parties. She is the kind of wife who turns social life into a profession, then pursues it as ambitiously as her husband does his.

Ian and Glynnis have perfected a well-arranged life together, one with few glitches more serious than a contentious adolescent daughter. Yet trouble stalks the Perfection-on-Hudsons of America. In both novels, life in a seemingly impervious social circle is upended by death (a husband is tried for murdering his wife in American Appetites, while in Middle Age, a man's drowning causes those who knew him to live and think differently).

Beyond the drama of specific deaths, what lends Oates's accounts their keen sociological edge is the way the idea of death is ever present in the lives of her privileged, successful characters. Oates formulates the existential problem succinctly in Middle Age: "How's a man to live when he knows he must die?" For the upper-middle class, confronting this reality involves as much irritation as dread. Irritation because members of this class are determined to convince themselves that death does not and really should not apply to them. Living in an ideal neighborhood in a secure country, taking advantage of a vast array of health- and beauty-preserving resources, they attempt to remove reminders of aging, suffering, and mortality itself from their midst. They anesthetize themselves with alcohol and antidepressants, and divert themselves with sex and socializing and consumer goods.

Where they can't distract themselves from their own mortality, they deny it, believing themselves immunized from death by virtue of their virtue. Oates's surgeons, lawyers, architects, research fellows, and journal editors live by a code of civility and liberal compassion, supporting good causes (the environment, the ACLU), and being "recognized" for their work. In short, they have paid their dues, preserved society's best values, and kept a reasonably low profile so as not to tempt the gods. But then death comes anyway! "Is this fair?" the narrator asks in Middle Age. "You leave your home in Salthill-on-Hudson on the muggy afternoon of July Fourth for a cookout ... and return days later as ashes in a cheesy-looking funeral urn: bone chunks and chips and coarse gritty powder to be dumped out, scattered, and raked in the crumbly soil of your own garden." Oates lays bare a class defined by the indignant perception of death as a personal affront.

Death lurks, and so does a pervasive, and deeply felt, aloneness. Impressions of tranquillity aside, even the best-ordered lives in Oates's fiction are subject to undercurrents of dread. In American Appetites, Ian dwells on a quotation he cannot place: "Just as we lie alone in our graves, so indeed do we live alone." Oates evokes this sense of isolation and the futility of human relationships--of the "soul being shrunk to something small, like a pea"--even more insistently in Middle Age. There the central character is Adam Berendt, a Socrates-like figure whose life and unexpected death set the story in motion. Berendt prods his friends with questions, inviting them to consider the state of their immortal souls. His interrogations provoke skepticism but also a measure of gratitude, even relief. A longing for transcendence, it seems, has not been entirely extinguished. As one character puts it, recalling Berendt after his death: "There is--must be--something greater than just us. Something beyond--us."

Such stubborn intimations of transcendence open up an ambiguous spiritual dimension in Oates's work. Middle Age follows the inner journeys of multiple characters struggling to find purpose in life: variously entering into new relationships, repairing old ones, and taking up forsaken ambitions, all in accord with some inner calling. Both American Appetites and Middle Age employ the image of the Fall prominently and follow trajectories of redemption. Yet in Oates's fictional world the loss of paradise--the revelation that this privileged life isn't everything it pretends to be--occurs without "sinful" transgression. And redemption has to do not with God's grace, but rather with the individual's courage to look honestly inward and persevere with dignity. Near the end of Middle Age, Oates offers a summation: "In the prime of their lives they'd been 'successful' and then, perhaps abruptly, unexpectedly, something had happened ... to break them, and make them doubt everything they'd believed in. Yet somehow they'd mended, and made a decision to live, and to live happily, as long as possible." In these works the Fall is a literary device serving a message of stoicism.

It is curious that Oates takes the notion of a soul seriously, yet seems to go to lengths to avoid affirming, or even recognizing, Christian perspectives on this matter. In American Appetites, she draws extensively on Buddhist thought, and in Middle Age on Platonic philosophy, to discuss the soul. Christian ideas about the soul are not engaged, even though it is in Christian terms that members of the class she is portraying typically conceive of the soul. There is a revealing exchange in Middle Age in which a woman, Augusta, asks the seer-artist figure, Adam Berendt, whether he believes in the God of "our tradition." Berendt counters: "How can you be so sure we share a tradition? Because we share a language ... doesn't mean we share a tradition.... I don't believe in a God, no. Not a God with personality, the petulant self-regarding God of the Bible. But I find it interesting that others believe."

This attitude would seem to be Oates's own, and it turns up as a weakness in her work. She seems not merely indifferent to Christianity, but emphatically averse. The faith associated with Oates's "Christian" characters tends to be either inconsequential (for example, the Unitarian minister in American Appetites), pathetic (Marianne in We Were the Mulvaneys), or downright menacing (Nathan in Son of the Morning or the divinity student Jared in First Love: A Gothic Tale). And her most recent novel, The Falls, rages against God, whose power (frequently malevolent) is symbolically linked to an awe-inspiring, untamable natural phenomenon. The novel takes up the vehement sorrows of the "Widow-Bride of the Falls," whose first husband commits suicide at Niagara Falls on their wedding night, and whose second succumbs years later to the water, precipitating the twice-bereaved woman into a lifetime of inveighing against a tricky, unpredictable, and malicious God who may or may not exist.

Joyce Carol Oates has been criticized for being too prolific; she should write less, some critics complain, and revise more. But in my view her work betrays other, more serious shortcomings--chiefly, its antipathy to Christianity, and its lack of levity, joy, and, ultimately, "affirmativeness." This limitation on her sympathies circumscribes her reach as a novelist. For one thing, it is a cultural blind spot, given an America that remains steeped in the Christian religion and imagination. Christianity's persistence is not limited to grotesqueries, fundamentalism, empty habit, or bourgeois hypocrisy; it also reflects the credible witness of intelligent believers. This is true even within the secularized elite, even in Princeton, New Jersey. It is one thing for Oates to reject Christianity herself, but another to foreclose the possibility that it may genuinely sustain and enrich the lives of others.

Perhaps for Oates, the Christian message is too good to be true, with its doctrines of resurrection and eternal life with God. Apparently she sees it as a Polyannaish religion meant for those who can't stomach the brutality of the world and the inescapable finality of death. (For evidence of this, see her biting New York Times article of December 30, 1999, "The Calendar's New Clothes.") Oates is, above all, a dark writer--sober, cynical, fully aware of how humans abuse trust and use their power (often violently) to dominate others. Her realistic depictions of such behavior are a great strength of her writing, but her fixation on the dark side of life can be a weakness too. Convincing depictions of common human warmth, mirth, and delight are almost nowhere to be found in her work. Currents of foreboding inevitably undermine the more hopeful transactions in her narratives, and her humorous moments always hinge on cynicism.

This is a problem of vision. We certainly need writers who can show us the dark side and the many ways we cheat our-selves and others--and this Oates does, perhaps better than any other contemporary writer. We also need writers who show us the goodness, silliness, and liberating joy that are equally real parts of human experience. The greatest writers give us the full range, even within a single work. They give us, along with a realistic depiction of life in its fullness, a conjecture on why life is worth living in the first place. It is a quality not found in Oates's work. Her characters press on in spite of their misery, but we readers come away with no clear reason for believing that people can be better than they are, or for imagining why they would even bother trying.

To my mind, a deficient view of the human person limits Oates's art. The highest achievements of art reveal, in the words of John Gardner, "what is necessary to humanness." In this regard, Oates's fictional world is incomplete. Hers is an exceptional talent; but it will be left to other American writers, those who advance a more compelling vision of the human person, to claim the title of Great American Novelist.

Timothy P. Schilling graduated from Princeton in 1987. He writes from the Center for Parish Spirituality, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.