The day I chose to read this book Joyce Carol Oates was actually in the news. Quite random, quite a coincidence, really. And what she did to get in the news is post a stupid tweet. Now I’m not going to turn this review into a tirade about the evils of twitter, because while, like most social media, it is absolutely an evil thing that gives platform to the levels of stupidity that not so long ago were private and /or geographically restricted to the stupids’ immediate radius and yes twitter is one of major signifiers of civilizations’ backwards tumble into abyss and all that…it doesn’t actually seem to preclude anyone from twittering away. Apparently everyone needs a soap box, a platform for their ignorance and vitriol to spew forth into the world. Such as a respected author who took it upon herself to post an obnoxiously rude snippy comment on something as innocuous as Anderson Cooper’s son’s birth announcement. The reason being Oates’ specific kind of feminism got offended by Cooper omitting to mention the surrogate mother. Seriously. Because it’s her business. Seriously. For me it’s like this…the wealthy, the famous, the 1% seem to buy nice things all the time without mentioning their provenance,  I wouldn’t expect Cooper to announce who incubated his baby for him any more than I would expect him to announce who build his mansion for him or who cooks his meals. I don’t even know why he needs to announce he bought a baby, but privacy is dead and people can’t shut up about themselves, so there we are. Plus there’s also a fact that surrogacy is to my understanding a private matter and someone might not want to be known as the baby incubator for pay. So then why does Joyce Carol Oates have such a need to defend this woman who must likely needs no defending? Because Oates seems to be practicing a very specific kind of feminism, the toxic kind. Am I coining toxic feminism here? Seems unlikely, but would be awesome if that’s the case. Mind you, I’m not in any way against feminism, the kind that promotes equality and recognition and all that, but when it gets perverted into a manhating one track minded obsessive sort of mission to find real or imaginary oppression in every single place…that’s disturbing. Offputting. Wrong. And it is exactly this kind of feminism that informs Oates’ literary output and so, as much as I actually like her as an author, it does circumspect the enjoyment of her work. These novellas are as well written tales of dark psychological drama as you can find, but they all have a certain similarity in the way the gender politics are presented. And so whether her protagonist is an adopted woman coming to Cardiff to discover her biological family or a young girl, barely a teenager, dealing with puberty and her creepy peado stepdad or a college age woman getting involved with her professors or a woman marrying a wealthy older man with a son who survived being murdered by his own mother…the theme is the same, the message is the same, men are predators, women are victims. Every single time. Men are rapists, liars, murderers. Women are raped, lied to, murdered. It’s a very disturbing sort of one note eulogy for the genders. At least Oates only deals with the two traditional (sisgender) ones, who knows what sort of a gory feast she’d have with the gendermultiverse of the modern day. Or maybe she wouldn’t, maybe that would be too complex and she seems to prefer the simplicity of the wicked perpetrator/victim duality of her imaginings. Shame really, because she’s such a talented author and has a real knack for profoundly disturbing and occasionally psychologically terrorizing the readers. It’s just difficult to enjoy something so bluntly message driven when a message is so…well, this. And there’s that quality to Oates’ writing too, it’s difficult to describe, but it’s viscerally unpleasant at times, like walking through a cobweb. Not necessarily a terrible thing, in fact it proves her effectiveness as an inventor of psychological disturbances of the mind, but still, it’s there. These aren’t easy books to love, there are books I don’t think I can ever love, admire, like, appreciate, sure, but never love. The second story was actually a revisit for me, I previously listened to it through Amazon shorts audio series and though I remembered most of it, it was still good the second time around. Oates definitely can write. Just imagine how good she might have been had she done her writing away from the soap box. And yes, I realize I spent much of this review on stating a personal opinion decrying the evils of a platform for personal opinions, but hey…if you can’t tell a difference between a handcrafted thought laden eloquent (one hopes) thought included in a review that is meant mostly for me (personal reading records) and whoever might enjoy it in this relatively small reading community of ours, but addressed to no one and a creatively spelled 280 character idiocy launched into the world at large and so often as a personal attack at random people…well, than, let’s face it, you might belong on twitter. For all others, thank you for reading and have a lovely day. Despite some enjoyment reading of this book might provide to the right audience in the right mood, it isn’t an easy one to recommend. Use your own discernment, as you always ought to anyway. Thanks Netgalley.