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could make the same point with female characters.) "In a sense," Oates writes
of Ian McCullough in her American Appetites worksheets, "Ian's violence is
his rejection of his life ... bis aging ... the fact that he has lost, or is losing,
the very passion of which l speak. Ian is me ... then ... 'to a degree."'The
worksheet passage continues in much the same vein as one finds in the
novel's opening chapter, when Ian goes to a run-down
part of
Poughkeepsie where Sigrid Huot lives. and is reminded "of his boyhood
neighborhood in Bridgeport. Connecticut" (17). But the voice of the
worksheets, which among other things tells of "a boy I suppose I adored
though I was frightened of him," is more Oates than Ian. By the end of the
passage the voices merge into what is really the core theme of American
Appetites: "It's my success," writes Oates/Ian, "the 'success' of my life
bores me so profoundly I come close, sometimes, to crying .... Have you ever
cried? Over good fortune?'"
The same process from the 'I' of the author to the 'I' of the character can
be seen in a scrawled thought concerning Judd Mulvaney. This example is
probably the very first note on what Oates later built up into a whole, brief
chapter of We Were the Mulvaneys entitled "Every Heartbeat!" (137-41). "At
home this morning, working out the story of the Mulvaneys," she writes, "my
alter ego-obsessed w/ lime":
I was watching the water below-in a trance-'i)bcating. ::t..'i7bca1 is past and

&llllt, This sent. / these words-cut through me. ::t..'vbcat js paSJ and eooc.
& I th't. I'm going to dic ... wca: au ... I felt a sense ofter. loss. Not just that
I wld lose these people I loved, & they wld. loZ me. but that lhl:x knew n'ng
of it. & I wld bn Jo pa:tcnd POI IP know wha1 I know.... from then on ... ,
obsessed w/ loss & lime.-'vbeats.

This shift from Oates talking of her "alter ego" 10 Judd speaking as he will in
the novel itself is evidence of the solitary-into-the-communal in action. Oates
believes that this process is the purpose and function of art. As she puts it in
The Faith of a Writer. she thinks that "we yearn to transcend the merely finite
and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called
'culture'<and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to
reproduce the species" (I).
That this is true would seem to be shown by the existence of volumes
such as this special issue. which brings together people who may have linle in
common beyond the fact that we are all readers who, often by very different
pathways, have been drawn to Oates's novels. The contributions come not
only from across the United States, but from Ireland, from a Portuguese-born
scholar based in England. and from a university president. co-writing an essay
with a recent undergraduate. While all, like Oates herself, are connected to
universities, the contributors include two novelists, Edmund White and Sharon
Oard Warner, as well as an historian, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
As one would expect, their contributions are equally diverse. We begin
with the insights of Oates's Princeton colleague, Edmund White, on, among