A Sentimental Education (short stories)

A Sentimental Education is a collection of 5 short stories and a novella by Joyce Carol Oates published in 1980 by E. P. Dutton.

Stories
Those stories first appearing in literary journals are indicated.


 * ”Queen of the Night”
 * ”The Precipice”
 * ”The Tryst” (The Atlantic, August 1976)
 * ”A Middle-Class Education”
 * ”In the Autumn of the Year” (Bennington Review, April 1978)
 * A Sentimental Education”

Reception
Kirkus Reviews registers impatience with Oates’s literary style, her “emptily elaborate prose” and her narratives which invariably “lapse into her standard grisly agenda.” The review limits its approval to one story, “The Autumn of the Year,” in which a young man brutally chastises his father’s former mistress for destroying his life and his mother’s. A Sentimental Education is rated “a disappointing collection from a gifted, epically erratic writer.”

Literary critic Robert Keily in The New York Times emphasizes the demoralized condition of the characters in these stories, evidenced by speaking in an exhausted vernaculars— “mouthing futile cliche after futile cliche”—and whose behaviors amount to a “collections of compulsions.”

Praising Oates for the “authenticity of her inventions,” Keily offers this caveat regarding the theme of the volume: "In her stories, there is an American profile: design but no beauty, clearsightedness but no vision, energy but no purpose. If such fiction appears to be an exercise in collective self-hatred, she may well have captured the spirit of the land."