The American Spectator

The Nation's Pulse

(Page 2 of 2)

DURING HER MANHATTAN appearance Oates spoke of the writing process; of her novels as "nests," in which she could see "little things from my own life woven in" among "the twigs" and structural bits that ultimately made the whole "an impersonal thing." She talked about the difference between writing and life. "As a writer you learn you cannot do justice to the multiplicity of life, because it becomes too choppy," she said. Through revision, it must be distilled, a lesson from fiction that has nonetheless informed Oates ability to extract the sublime from mano a mano struggles.

p>Again, from On Boxing : br> /p>

To turn from an ordinary preliminary match to a "Fight of the Century" like those between Joe Louis and Billy Conn, Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns is to turn from listening or half-listening to a guitar being idly plucked to hearing Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier perfectly executed, and that too is part of the story's mystery: so much happens so swiftly and with such heart-stopping subtlety you cannot absorb it except to know something profound is happening and it is happening in a place beyond words.

As Oates describes boxing, so too could we describe her writing.

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