Fear stalks the veteran writer’s 46th novel – a disturbing love story set in a totalitarian US
Joyce Carol Oates’s Hazards of Time Travel is her 46th novel, which is in itself an astonishing achievement (it’s published alongside a reissue of her bestselling novel Blonde). It is a dystopian narrative in which the indomitable Oates seems to be flexing new muscles. She is an extraordinary veteran of fiction and turns clairvoyant (perhaps drawing on anxiety about the US’s toxic political present) with the same authority she brings to everything she writes. But brace yourself: it is an unrelentingly disturbing read.
The time is 20 years from now and the setting the totalitarian North American States, or NAS. People live in fear, their speech anything but free. The punishment for speaking out is likely to be “deletion” (which sounds like a particularly writerly form of doom).
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