Joyce Carol Oates Is Obsessed With Life’s Turning Points

“Babysitter,” Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel, opens with a woman on the precipice of an affair. Hannah, a 1970s housewife from a posh Detroit suburb in expensive clothes and “impractical stilettos by Saint Laurent,” is making her way to a downtown hotel to see the handsome stranger she met at a swank fundraiser. “This is a mistake,” she thinks as she walks toward his room. “Turn back.”