Once they were safe inside their cozy locked room they luxuriated in their lovemaking, Jacuzzi bathing, take-out McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Chinese and Italian food, giant Pepsis (for Rickie) and six-packs of beer (for Mrs. Halifax entered the hotel lobbies, but her adolescent son was sometimes glimpsed in the parking lot, or in the video arcade, or, if there was an indoor heated pool, there. Halifax and her teenaged son (Brian/Jason/Troy/Mark). Days Inn, Bide-a-Wee, Econo-Lodge, Sleep E Hollow, Holiday Inn (Rahway, Metuchen), Travellers Inn, Best Western. Halifax and Rickie Swann: A Ballad” (in her 2004 collection, I Am No One You Know), a woman carries on an affair with a 15-year-old boy, and together they go on the Grand Tour of New Jersey motels and fast-food joints: When it comes to imagining the appropriate backdrop for somebody’s emotional instability, any (to pick one of Oates’ favorite adjectives in this context) shabby inn will do. Describing a scene in Little Bird in which an adolescent girl is kidnapped by her father and taken to a Days Inn where a bloody standoff ensues, Fraser quips: “how that chain must love Joyce Carol Oates.”Īctually, as far as the miseries connected to rented rooms go, Oates isn’t especially brand-loyal. req’d) in the New York Review of Books on two of Joyce Carol Oates recent works of fiction-the novel Little Bird of Heaven and the story collection Dear Husband- Caroline Fraser cracks a joke.
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