1 out of 5

Hey y’all, guess what?  I am a penis-carrying member of the bepenised club, which means that my every waking thought revolves around sex and violence and attacking women with one or the other!  Or both!  Damn bitches and stuff!  But woe is the human condition, where yon vaginas seek positive attentions no matter the source, creating a horrid feedback loop of women criticizing women, men criticizing women, and lots of jackhammer sexin’.

Oates has published works dating back to the 60s.  Interestingly, being the ignorant I-only-read-Boys-Life-and-Maxim typea’ corn-fed fella’ I am, I’m not familiar with her outside of this One Story, and my initial thought was that she was a new and young writer, due to a couple of clunky sentences that felt like they were reaching for poetic, as well as the fairly simplified view of sexuality that I associate with coming-of-age mentalities.  Because here’s the other guess what: during the uncomfortable, red-cheeked dawning of my own hormones, a healthy guilty Jewish background, general kid boners-are-gross persecution, and a lack of any clear affection in the home (check, check, check) helped to produce a horny youngster who hated his horniness, and soon turned to very anti-male beliefs: that all we think about is sex, and dot dot dot.  Many of the aspects expressed by one narrator or the other in Woman in the Window – the married, older man drunkenly wandering the streets toward his kept woman, or that kept woman in her paid-for apartment, waiting for her scheduled sex appointment and contemplating killing her lecherous suitor – I had echoes of in those long-ago days.  And to be fair, Oates isn’t exclusively one-sided, exposing the hypocrisy of the female side of the equation; the ignorances that attribute to staying in dangerous relationships.  But neither is this a balanced study that Rashomon’s different points-of-view: both narrators lean into Man Bad Woman Manipulated stances.

As, previously mentioned, an owner of XY chromosomes, I don’t mean to absolve myself or my gender.  My sexuality has withered and died over the years, putting me into a more cynical mindset than those still hunting and gathering genitalia, but I’m not in denial of the gender divides, and the truths wended into the thoughts Joyce has expressed in Woman.  Relationships like the one written about exist, and sure, have a right to be written about.  But it’s akin to the writing I was doing in those self-hating years: setting aside the quality of the writing, the ideas were rapaciously Against males and male sexuality.  I wrote it, those feelings were real.  They were also very limited in scope, and the me of now spots some valid ideas (and certainly ideas that have shaped where I am now), but lacking the – and fuck this word, but it applies – experience to see a bigger picture.  This sort of amounts it to a manifesto, and a hate-fueled one.  It supports only those who feel that way; beyond the outlet it allowed me, I don’t think the writing would be the kind of emotional encouragement I’d want to offer any one else.

So, sadly, unless Woman in the Window is a purposefully limited exercise in point of view – which doesn’t come across here – the story serves as sad proof of the way feelings don’t have to change over the years.  The tale takes place in 1926; Oates was born in 1938.  Things were different during her formative years.  We somewhat overlook when our parents / grandparents express racist or ignorant views, but if they wrote a book expressing the same, should we overlook it?

I’m not maligning this author’s massive body of work, especially given that I’ve only read this small blurb.  I am, though, maligning this small blurb.