[In Son of the Morning] Nathanael Vickery is an evangelist who believes that he is visited by Christ, even chosen by God to be one with His Son in a miraculous second coming…. Oates has never shied away from important matters of the day. Though she can become much too elaborate in statements about her fiction, I believe she feels a direct responsibility to her readers to perform as a worthy recorder of the times. What sustains Oates's novels is not her journalistic coverage of migrant workers, Detroit ghettos, the crazed world of revivalism, but her own belief that these subjects must be realized as fiction. At her best she creates whole segments of American life with wonderful fidelity like the small-town childhood of Nathanael Vickery…. Joyce Carol Oates has always been a good child psychologist, and we can see in her portrait of the boy Nathanael his...