These weird ironies are the vertebrae of many of Oates' best stories. Sometimes they protrude like irregular knobs; more often, they're slipped in, almost surreptitiously:
Slowly, out of habit, their bodies twined together. They embraced. They were friends, though perhaps not best friends, they were in love. When they made love Nina thought, there, that's accomplishment, if we die now we're that much to the good . . . .
In many stories, the neat ironies, the tiny vertebrae give way to something more formless, confusion without any supportive skeleton. In "Convalescing," a man traumatized by a car accident tries to understand his wife:
He pressed his hand against his forehead, baffled by the mystery of personality. Who were these people? Who was this woman that she had come to mean so mean so much to him? It was not just his own soul that was opaque, lost, but the souls of people he loved and had believed he knew, had trusted . . . and beyond them, the shadowy souls of people known to him only over the television screen or in newspaper photographs, the famous and notorious, monumental figures, shadowy nubs of being as mysterious to him as his own past.
Another man confesses his fears in "An Interior Monologue":
I have lived alone for years, since I left my parents' house. I wake up at a quarter to one, with a headache. I take an aspirin, a simple and innocent act and suddenly I see them-lying in an embrace, the sheet carelessly over them, X up on one elbow and joking with her and her joking back, nothing is serious or sacred between them, they are in love, in love, in love; I am six miles away suddenly nauseated, living alone.
Their confessions wrench us not only because they are so personal, but also because in their amorphousness is a despair we can all feel, not as women or men, but as human beings. And surely, this is Joyce Carol Oates' only real concern, evoking this kind of understanding, raising this kind of human consciousness. And her Wheel of Love then is also a wheel of lies, of lust, of loss, of life.