Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Home Page

A Sentimental Education

by Joyce Carol Oates

New York: Dutton, 1980

196 pages

Dust Jacket Blurb

The publication of Bellefleur has brought Joyce Carol Oates—already established as one of America's most significant contemporary writers—the broad readership her wonderfully rewarding work deserves. In this new book, she explores the secrets of the human heart in superbly crafted stories and a novella.

Whether writing about women or men, young or old, she makes us witness to those moments of extremity when the passions burn brightest, when desire and reality collide: a vain divorcee too hastily marries her young lover; a radio program director, witness to a shooting, becomes obsessed with his own mortality; a professor's mild manner somehow inevitably leads to violence; an eminent poet finds her luminous past shattered by the revelations of her lover's son.

Perhaps nowhere has the region where love borders violence been so fully explored as in the title novella. It is an exquisite portrayal of the erotic love that flowers when nineteen-year-old Duncan spends a summer on the Maine coast with his younger cousin Antoinette. In the vastness of inexperience, imagination provides the only boundaries. "A Sentimental Education" is charged with an intensity which many of us experienced at the edge of adolescence, but few have remembered so vividly since.

Queen of the Night
The Precipice
The Tryst
A Middle-Class Education
In the Autumn of the Year
A Sentimental Education

Excerpt

From "Queen of the Night"

This is how Claire Falk's marriage of twenty-six years, which accounted for more than half her life, ended one humid Saturday afternoon in June: she blundered into overhearing a conversation.

It was one-sided, only one-half of a conversation, because her husband was on the telephone. And there were no words to it, no distinct recognizable words, because she was nearly out of earshot. She heard only sounds. Her husband's voice, curiously raw and aggrieved, a young man's voice, and yet his. She would know it anywhere.

He was arguing with someone. And then begging. His voice rose and dipped and went silent. Then began again: strident, passionate, craven, exasperated, frightened. A harsh, jagged, dissonant music Claire had never known in her lifetime.

Or, if she had known it—it had been long ago, many years ago.

Other Editions

paperback

Reviews

Booklist, November 15, 1980, p422
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 1980, p1482
Publishers Weekly, November 28, 1980, p45
Library Journal, December 1, 1980, p2516
Saturday Review, January 1981, p72-73
Vogue, January 1981, p30,32
New York Times Book Review, January 4, 1981, p7,21
Newsweek, January 26, 1981, p74A
New Leader, February 9, 1981, p13
Washington Post Book World, February 22, 1981, p10
New Statesman, March 6, 1981, p22-23
Sunday Times, March 8, 1981, p42
Observer, March 15, 1981, p33
Times Literary Supplement, March 20, 1981, p303
Christian Science Monitor, March 30, 1981, p19
Books in Canada, April 1981, p20
America, April 4, 1981, p281
Listener, April 23, 1981, p549
Commonweal, August 28, 1981, p475-476
World Literature Today, Autumn 1981, p672-673
Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1982, p19

Awards

Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 1979: "In the Autumn of the Year"

Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/stories/sentimental.html


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