Expensive People
.jpg) First Edition | |
| Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | novel |
| Publisher | Vanguard Press |
| Publication date | 1968 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 308 |
| ISBN | 978-0814901700 |
Expensive People is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates first published in 1968 by Vanguard Press. A Fawcett Publications paperback edition was issued in 1974.[1][2]
The novel is the second in Oates's Wonderland Quartet including A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), them (1969), and Wonderland.[3]
Plot
 | This section needs a plot summary. (February 2025) |
Expensive People is told by an unreliable first-person narrator, the eighteen-year-old Richard Everett, who opens his "memoir" with the entry: "I was a child murderer."[4][5][6]
Reception
New York Times literary critic John Knowles congratulates Joyce Carol Oates for undertaking a project fraught with "technical problems" that challenge "her literary imagination and her talent," but with some success. The use of a first-person confessional narrative Mr. Knowles regards as a "powerful and tricky concoction." The novel's narrator, the 18-year-old and self-confessed murderer, Richard Everett, "digresses to give us his views on art, writing, imagery, puns, you, me, and so on." The reviewer confesses, self-mockingly, that the precocious protagonist wrote his review.[7]
Retrospective appraisal
In tone and style, Expensive People is a "striking departure" from Oates's fiction to that date. Abandoning the third-person omniscient examination the focal character, the novel is postmodernist, presented as a memoir by an unreliable narrator.[8][9]
Literary critic Greg Johnson identifies the novel as a "contemporary Gothic satire" in the style of Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita (1955), and an "exploration of American culture."[10] Johnson remarks on the comic elements of the novel:
On a purely literary plane, the novel parodies the memoir, literary criticism, and especially the traditions of the realistic novel and the "unreliable narrator" itself - even as it partakes of all these.[11] Johnson reminds readers that the experimental aspects of the novel include autobiographical references to Oates's physical appearance and family history.[12]
Theme
Terming the novel a "naturalist allegory" and a "tour-de-force," biographer Joanne V. Creighton locates its thematic center:
Rather than a piece of naturalistic realism like her other novels, Expensive People is a masterful satire of both literary and suburban conventions. At the core of the novel is Oates's questioning - at once playful and probing - of the elusive nature of both life and art.[13]
Oates goes so far with self-parody as to portray her protagonist consulting and critiquing one of her essays, "Building Tension in the Short Story" (The Writer, June 1966).[14]
Footnotes
- ^ Johnson, 1994 pp. 218-222: Selected Bibliography, Primary Works
- ^ Creighton, 1979 pp. 161-169: Selected Bibliography
- ^ Johnson, 1987 p. 15: Lowercase for "them" is correct.
- ^ Creighton, 1979 p. 55, p. 56: "...highly subjective first-person narrator..."
- ^ Creighton, 1979 p. 55-63: Extended plot synopsis.
- ^ Johnson, 1987 p. 52-54: Plot sketch
- ^ Knowles, 1997
- ^ Johnson, 1987 p. 49
- ^ Creighton, 1979 p. 56: Richard "has all the bias of a highly subjective first-person narrator.."
- ^ Johnson, 1987 p. 52: "...a dazzling Nabokovian artifice...", p. 52
- ^ Johnson, 1987 p. 51-52: Oates on "comic" aspects. And p. 52: blockquote material
- ^ Johnson, 1987 p. 51
- ^ Creighton, 1979 p. 56
- ^ Creighton, 1979 p. 59, p. 163: Selected Bibliography
Sources
- Creighton, Joanne V. 1979. Joyce Carol Oates. Twayne Publishers, New York. Warren G. French, editor. ISBN 0-8057-7212-X
- Johnson, Greg. 1987. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, South Carolina. ISBN 0-87249-524-8
- Johnson, Greg. 1994. Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne's studies in short fiction; no. 57. Twayne Publishers, New York. ISBN 0-8057-0857-X
- Knowles, John. 1997. "Nada at the Core" The New York Times, November 3, 1968. Nada at the Core Accessed January 15, 2025.
- Oates, Joyce Carol. 1968. Expensive People. Vanguard Press, New York. ISBN 978-0814901700
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