SOURCE: "Heat and Cold: Recent Fiction by Joyce Carol Oates," in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, Summer, 1992, pp. 400-14.

In the following review, Robinson surveys the themes and storytelling techniques of The Rise of Life on Earth, I Lock My Door Upon Myself, and Heat and Other Stories, focusing on representations of 'otherness' in her fiction.

To read Joyce Carol Oates is to be placed in the uncomfortably fascinating position of voyeur. From the early novels them and Wonderland to her most recent fiction, Oates has specialized in a narrative technique that intrudes upon the private pains and pleasures—but mostly pains—of Others. Her narratives often explore the dynamics of a voyeurism in which subject and object confront one another across a gulf of social difference. In some cases, the confrontation takes place between characters in the story; in others, Oates stages a confrontation between the...