Ode to Joyce

Some critics have held her output against her, the most notorious example being James Wolcott's 1982 hatchet job, ''Stop Me Before I Write Again: Six Hundred More Pages by Joyce Carol Oates.''

''Like most people, I can be very easily hurt,'' says Oates, who has been known to fire off angry letters to critics she felt had been unfair. ''You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.'' But today her response to barbs about her productivity is mild: ''I think it's inevitable,'' says Oates. ''And understandable.''

Her friends are less forgiving. ''In any other profession, if someone was productive, it would be a positive,'' says Daniel Halpern, Oates' editor. ''It's a stupid response.'' A Princeton colleague, novelist Edmund White, thinks she gets a bad rap because she's a woman: ''John Updike writes a novel a year, but very few people go, 'Oh, groan, another book by Updike.'''

What's indisputable is that Oates has enviable discipline. In addition to teaching popular courses at Princeton, she writes every day, from morning until early afternoon, often resuming work in the evening. She claims to daydream about her narratives constantly, while jogging, while cooking, while gazing out her office window. And she has said she finds sleeping and eating unwelcome distractions from the ''enraptured conversation'' in her head.

Comments like these fuel the myth of Oates as a chilly writing machine. In fact, she is friendly, sympathetic, and gently inquisitive. During the course of the interview, she asks almost as many questions as she answers — not the expected polite social questions, but whether I like the name Jennifer, what I named my cats, if I'm Irish — and seems to consider each answer carefully before moving on. You get the eerie feeling that your answers are going into a powerful imaginative database.

Which, of course, they are. ''She's very sly,'' says Halpern. ''Recently she said, 'I've finished this novel, and there is a character you may think is like you.' As soon as she says that, I get a little nervous.'' Halpern will have to wait to see how he fares. When Oates completes a manuscript she puts it in a drawer for a year so she can distance herself emotionally. The extremely personal Gravedigger's Daughter spent even longer in the drawer. ''I can't read the end without starting to cry because I feel like my grandmother and I are communicating across the decades,'' says Oates. ''Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and this feeling of panic comes over me. I think, This novel is going to be published and people are going to have all sorts of thoughts about it and some people won't like it. Maybe they won't like my grandmother! Or maybe they won't like my father! Or my writing! It seems, suddenly, that I've bared my heart.