Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific writer, penning countless stories, plays, novels, and more in her six decade career as an author. The (Other) You (2021), her latest collection of short stories, focusses on paths not taken. The characters of the fifteen tales experience regret and longing, love and disappointment.
There is no doubt that Oates is a gifted writer. Some of these stories feel autobiographical, penned from lived experience, such as 'The Unexpected' in which a famous writer returns to her hometown in upstate New York to receive an award from the University, finds the town altered and not entirely as she remembered.
The standouts in this collection are the shorter stories like 'Where are you?' about an elderly couple where the husband refuses to wear a hearing aid and does not hear her when she needs him. Likewise 'Hospice/Honeymoon' is a heartbreaking story about a married couple deciding on palliative care.
The longer stories, like 'Blue Guide', did not work so well and tended to meander. This story started out with promise - upon retirement, a professor journeys to Italy with his wife, to relive his memories of time spent there as a young man. He finds that the town is not the same as he remembers and consults his decades-old blue guide travel book to find his bearings. The story lost pace as it went on, with the professor repeatedly coming across things that were not quite as he recalled.
Short story collections can be hit-or-miss. On the whole, I found The (Other) You to be a miss which was disappointing as I had been looking forward to it. While there were a handful of delightful gems, the collection did not pull together leaving me dissatisfied.