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Perhaps one of Joyce Carol Oates' most valuable assets as a critic is her willingness to reconsider.

In her most recent book of critical essays and prose pieces, Oates displays a style that reflects a vital, almost conversational, relationship with the work she is reviewing and an inclination to return to the conversation even after the review has been written.

Such an approach proves remarkably engaging. The reader is invited to participate in the discourse in a way that fosters a respect for Oates' methods, even when one disagrees with her conclusions.

In the preface to Uncensored: Views & (Re)Views, the author establishes her aim "to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books 'negatively' except in those instances in which the 'negative' is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author."

That's not to say that Oates is wholly uncritical in her approach. She proves more than willing to call writers on their failures, ranging from a waning of originality to a lack of complexity in characters.

Still, her fundamental love of literature is always apparent. The remarkable breadth of her reading allows her to place a work in a variety of contexts, and a thoughtful consideration of other arts gives Oates the ability to explain characters and images in deeper, or at least more original, ways.

As a prolific writer of novels and short stories, Oates has a kinship with her subjects and writes with an empathy lacking in much criticism. One of the recurring themes in this volume is a consistent argument against the ways writers are politicized and otherwise used without their consent. Oates introduces the notion early in considerations of Sylvia Plath and Willa Cather. Both writers, often through means of misrepresentation, have been established as icons of a feminist agenda in an age of deconstructionalist thought. Oates exposes the ways in which their lives contradicted the images that have been created since their deaths and rails against the "avid prurience" with which critics delve into the intimate lives of these dead writers in an effort to promote a reading of their work to suit a particular doctrine.

Later in the volume, Oates dissects the specific phenomenon of the publication of an author's letters in "Private Writings, Public Betrayals." Her disdain for the restoration of expurgated letters by Nathaniel Hawthorne to his wife, as well as the sale at auction of letters written by J.D. Salinger to a young lover, is clear. It's balanced, however, by an acknowledgment that affirms the Joan Didion maxim, "Writers are always selling somebody out."

"Anyone who confides in any writer risks being transmogrified into art if he or she is sufficiently interesting," Oates writes. "The best protection is to be dull, bland and predictable."

This piece shows the great strength of the volume -- Oates' ability to use her experience as author to enlighten her criticism. Fans of her fiction won't be surprised at how well Oates can write, but the thing that distinguishes her as a critic is how well she reads.

<b>czempter@thisweeknews.com