The title of Joyce Carol Oates's new collection of stories, "Beautiful Days," is drawn from "Les Beaux Jours," a painting by Balthus of a girl reclining in a chair and examining herself in a hand mirror, while a faceless man tends the fireplace behind her. But it might equally refer to "Fleuve Blue" or "Big Burnt," the first two stories in the book - which are about (among other things) the strange disconnection that separates our romantic lives from the rest of life. "Fleuve Blue" describes an affair between a prominent small-town lawyer and a younger woman, whom he first sees walking across a bridge. He thinks, "I will marry her. That one." Except, of course, he's already married. Later, he offers her a ride when she gets caught wearing high heels in a downpour and they start meeting in the afternoon in a rented room. "She told him it would be the inside-out of the rest of her life, her relationship with him. ... She meant, what they had together was a counter-world. ... 'Because I'm always lying. In that other life. In my "real" life. I tell people - I tell myself - "I live for my children. I adore my children.'" " Unsurprisingly, their affair turns out to be susceptible to the same sort of forces that she wants to escape in her real life - boredom and the passage of time. But it's the lying, or deception, or really just the uncertainty about other people that dominates the rest of this collection. A woman desperate for marriage spends a weekend with a guy she used to date who hasn't always been particularly nice to her. She doesn't know that he's tying up loose ends before killing himself, and afterward she has to deal with the puzzle of his intentions. Even years of shared life fail to produce real intimacy. Parents are just as untrustworthy as lovers. In "Owl Eyes," a geeky kid at a math camp runs into a professor who tells him a story about how he used to be involved with the boy's mother - that he used to be a father to the boy himself. Vague memories come back to the boy, but it's hard to tell if they offer doubt or hope. In general, Oates is dealing here with the academic world - professors and their kids, editors, writers, adjuncts - people who live in the provinces, on the outskirts of real success. Characters are often referred to by titles rather than names: mother, daddy, wife, husband, professor. "Except You Bless Me," one of the standouts in a very strong collection, recounts an early incident in a woman's teaching career. She has become convinced that a black student in her class - one she's been trying to help - has been sending her racist hate messages. Is the professor unusually patient and conscientious or completely delusional and possibly racist herself? Slowly the realism of the collection gives way to stories that are more experimental. Oates is a master of many different kinds of story, including the gothic and something like science fiction - "Fractal," for example, and the extraordinary "Undocumented Alien," which follows a Nigerian man tricked into applying for a bogus degree at a New Jersey engineering college. Eventually, to stop himself from being deported, he agrees to take part in a secret government experiment designed to test the extent to which people can be denatured. The power of the conceit, of course, comes from the fact that this is happening anyway. This is Oates's real trick, that her formal games and realism tend to reinforce each other - they make the same case. That title story, "Les Beaux Jours," imagines Balthus's painting from the girl's point of view. She's a privileged New Yorker who starts haunting the Metropolitan Museum after her father leaves the family and manages, somehow, to become a model for her favorite artist. It's a kind of Rapunzel tale in reverse, where the girl who is caught in the real world (at least as real as her mother's apartment on Fifth Avenue allows for) dreams of being imprisoned in the tower. She is seeking "something she could not have defined - the consolation of art, the impersonality of art, the escape of art." At least until she gets there. ? Lying, deception and just pledn uncertainty about other people dominate the collection. BENJAMIN MARKOVITS'S most recent novel is "You Don't Have to Live Like This."

Haunted, wounded, isolated characters people Oates' latest collection.In most of these 12 previously published stories, Oates (DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mysteries and Suspense, 2017, etc.) reprises characters who appear in much of her fiction: lonely, frustrated, and obsessed individuals trapped in relationships that offer no solace, satisfaction, or even recognition of who they really are. Lest readers fail to see a Chekhov-ian influence, Oates' central character in "Big Burnt" is a 40-something, twice divorced actress who attracts the attention of a taciturn Harvard scientist when she performs in The Cherry Orchard. Accompanying him on a weekend outing, she tries to amuse her preoccupied lover by behaving like "the ingnue Nina of The Seagull. She heard her voice just too perceptibly loud, rather raw, over-eager." But she cannot alleviate Mikael's suffering: over his "disintegrated" marriage, his children's "disenchantment," and, most recently, the accusation that he deliberately falsified data. He toys with the idea of killing himself: "Blow out my brains," he reflects ruefully, had "a Chekhovian ring...a remark, melancholy, yet bemused. A joke!" There are no jokes, though, in Oates' dark fictions. In "Fleuve Bleu," the idea of illicit love, at first seeming like a "small gemstone" fingered in a secret pocket, turns into an unwanted burden. In "Owl Eyes," an unhappy single mother is preoccupied by failure. Three stories consider the plights of embittered, angry, and arrogant academics. Distinguished intellectuals, Oates reports, often display "aggressionmasked by a perverse sort of passivity." Two surprisingly inventive tales appear in a section of fantasy and surrealism. "Les Beaux Jours" is narrated by a young girl so seduced by an erotic painting with that title that she enters its world to become the Master's model only to discover that she can never return to her "old, lost life." In "Fractal," a boy obsessed with fractals and architectural drawings is swallowed up in a windowless, labyrinthian Fractal Museum. The overly long "Undocumented Alien," though, about an immigrant who becomes a subject of neurological manipulation, is far less successful.A mixed, occasionally satisfying, volume. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Oates' latest story collection features varied characters coping with confounding situations and relationships, with reconciliation often just beyond their grasp, whether they desire it or not. The 12 tales examine the forces and preconceptions that guide the characters' internal navigation. In Fleuve Bleu, a chance encounter between strangers evolves into an affair involving power dynamics as well as the effects of self-justification in the pursuit of individual pleasure. The Bereaved follows Max and his younger wife, Becca, after the death of Max's troubled daughter (and Becca's stepdaughter), as the couple embarks on a cruise to avoid a cruel anniversary. It's a well-meaning diversion that soon reveals uneasy perceptions, memories, and doubts. Realities and influences shift and transform in the collection's later works. The haunting Fractal tracks a mother and young son as they travel to a museum specializing in the son's favorite subject, the story simmering in quiet panic as the visit frenetically devolves. Oates' diverse tales offer a forthright exploration of her characters' impulsiveness and internal provocations, further exposing the uncomfortable, virulent truths in their lives, and ours.--Strauss, Leah Copyright 2018 Booklist

Oates (A Book of American Martyrs) toes the line between condemnation of and fascination with her characters in this collection of ethical failures. In part one, the characters' self-definitions blind them to the pain they cause themselves and each other-as in "Fleuve Bleu," in which lovers promise complete honesty and deliver needless pain. In the second part, assumptions, biases, and privilege stymie awareness among people of different races, genders, and body types. In "Except You Bless Me," a white adjunct composition instructor suspects without clear cause that a black student has been sending her hate mail. In the collection's speculative, fabulist third act, there are clear victims-the only characters readers will find sympathetic. In "Fractal," a boy becomes separated (both physically and emotionally) from his mother as they tour a fractal museum. In "David Barthelme Saved from Oblivion," a string of children leads an alcoholic writer away from his favorite liquor store. Throughout the book, the characters speak to themselves at least as often as they speak to each other. The Pushcart-winning "Undocumented Alien" is composed entirely of lab notes by postdocs more concerned with their work conditions than the ethics of their research. In Oates's narrowly constructed cast of ivory tower intelligentsia, subtle, toxic failings go unchecked. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

With her usual acute grasp of human psychology, the prolific, multi-award-winning Oates delivers a hefty volume of short stories in three parts. Pieces in the first section mostly explore lacerating relationships that are broken or breaking. A married man tires of the daring and dazzling honesty he and his younger lover, also married, once shared; as he returns later, when she has cancer, she shouts him down. A man plots to implicate a woman who loves him in his death, and elsewhere, a couple for whom marriage "is an affable not-quite-hearing" bend but perhaps don't break under the strain of a daughter's death. The second section features identity confusion, with a white woman convinced that the black nurse easing her pain is the hostile student she once tried to help, and a professor who is intrigued by a staring woman learns that she thought he was deceased. In the final section, a young woman worships the reckless "master" who controls her and an African student unprepared for an American university education is deprived of his visa and subjected to horrific indignities. VERDICT -Perceptive, un-missable work. [See Prepub Alert, 8/28/17.] © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.