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 Wild Saturday
by Joyce Carol Oates
London: Dent, 1984
184 pages
Dust Jacket Blurb
To their uncomprehending parents they were just 'crazy kids': shoplifting, staying out all night, hanging around with weird friends. But for Connie, Alex, Tessa and the others nothing was more urgent than finding out what life held in store uniquely for them. Impatient of repressive parents, bored by the rituals of their suburban homes, they wanted to try out their own dreams for real.
All too often they become casualties of their own rebellion. Connie's daydreams about boys end in the nightmare of rape. Dorie, mooning over her college professor, finds herself locked into a sterile marriage with him. Yet no one can deny them the validity of their experience. As Joyce Carol Oates writes of Dorie, 'she was herself and that was a fact, a final fact she would never overcome.'
Joyce Carol Oates is perhaps at her very best in the short story. Here, with honesty and compassion, she encapsulates the experience of a whole generation of American youth.
Excerpt
From "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again"
In Detroit, weather weighs heavily upon everyone. The sky looms large. The horizon shimmers in smoke. Downtown the buildings are imprecise in the haze. Perpetual haze. Perpetual motion inside the haze. Across the choppy river is the city of Windsor, in Canada. Part of the continent has bunched up here and is bulging outward, at the tip of Detroit; a cold hard rain is forever falling on the expressways . . . . Shoppers shop grimly, their cars are not parked in safe places, their windshields may be smashed and graceful ebony hands may drag them out through their shatterproof smashed windshields, crying, Revenge for the Indians! Ah, they all fear leaving Hudson's and being dragged to the very tip of the city and thrown off the parking roof of Cobo Hall, that expensive tomb, into the river . . . .
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Contents
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
Accomplished Desires
Wild Saturday
Boy and Girl
Demons
A Girl at the Edge of the Ocean
Stray Children
In the Region of Ice
How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again
Awards
- Best American Short Stories, 1970: "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction, and Began My Life Over Again"
- Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 1970: "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction, and Began My Life Over Again"
- Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 1968, 2nd Prize: "Accomplished Desires"
- Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 1968: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
- Best American Short Stories, 1967: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
- Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 1st Prize, 1967: "In the Region of Ice"
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Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/stories/saturday.html
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