Oates frequently writes from a male perspective, but never so insistently as in What I Lived For as she records the thought processes of the sex-obsessed Corky Corcoran. Her fiction has always tended toward the violent, but it has also insisted that there is a transcendent quality to the anger that generates the violence because anger is better than complacency. In recent years, she has, however, moved so far into the psyche of the disturbed—as in her 1995 novel about a serial killer, Zombie—that she risks losing this more hopeful quality to her work.

Although What I Live For still manages to believe in transcendence, in some kernel of goodness, this is deeply buried in the voice of Corky Corcoran that we hear.

Oates has often spoken about the importance of pacing scenes in fiction, and in her description from Corky's point of...