“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Joyce Carol Oates

A review and analysis

My God, Joyce Carol Oates seems to have been writing forever. Still has it though. This story is basically a story about a group of people facing their own failing health and mortality as well as the parallel failing health of the environment. It’s written in third person omniscient, though the vast majority of it is seen through the character of Luce.

Luce is concerned enough about the environment that she wears a breathing mask to fight picking up some disease. The whole neighborhood burns down during a forest fire, except for the house Luce and her husband, Andrew, live in. Andrew doesn’t seem to take seriously the decline in the environment or his own aging body, though Luce notes he doesn’t even remember one of their close friends died some time ago.

The story’s climactic scene has Luce and three other aging musicians playing Schubert’s Quartet №14 in D Minor, a complicated piece they mostly pull off with a few flaws, but it’s a success. They are performing outdoors and they manage to complete it just before a giant storm rolls through. During the piece you can almost feel them struggling against their own failing skills, like an elderly person walking into a headwind.

This story appeared in The New Yorker, a magazine I just recently subscribed to, again. I had a subscription maybe seven or eight years primarily for the fiction, but most of the stories I found dull. The magazine has the same fiction editor, so I’ll see how this goes. Looking back at recent past issues it looks like there’s good stuff. So we’ll see.