Expensive People Read online

  PRAISE FOR JOYCE CAROL OATES AND

  EXPENSIVE PEOPLE

  “You cannot put this novel away after you have opened it. This is that kind of book—hypnotic, fascinating, and electrifying.”

  —The Detroit News

  “The question is no longer whether Miss Oates is a very good writer—she is, indeed—but just how far and high she can thrust the trajectory of brilliant accomplishment.… Everything she touches turns to such blistering gold… . [Expensive People] is satire, confession, dream, report on suburbia, gothic tale in contemporary dress … fused into a prophetic novel as singular in effect as the night cry of a hurt animal.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “Cuts to the bone in its chilling effectiveness.” —Publishers Weekly

  “In her new novel, Expensive Peoplejoyce Carol Oates has made a very large demand upon her literary imagination and her talent. She has asked herself to become a 250-pound, eighteen-year-old boy-genius sitting alone in a shabby rented room composing a memoir about how he assassinated one of his parents…. [Miss Oates] has a great deal of talent, and it rises strongly to this formidable challenge.”

  —The New York Times

  “A future archaeologist equipped only with [Oates's] oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.”

  —HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

  “Oates writes prose of striking directness and simplicity. Everything she writes bears the marks of a terrific imaginative pressure…. She invests everything she touches with the qualities of her own voice, which is nervous, fast, febrile and hot as an iron. I'd unhesitatingly say that she is one of the most important living American writers.”

  —PETER STRAUB

  ALSO BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

  NOVELS

  With Shuddering Fall (1964)

  A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967)

  them (1969)

  Wonderland (1971)

  Do with Me What You Will (1973)

  The Assassins (1975)

  Childwold (1976)

  Son of the Morning(1978)

  Cybele (1979)

  Unboly Loves (1979)

  Bellefleur (1980)

  Angel of Light (1981)

  A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)

  Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)

  Solstice (1985)

  Marya: A Life (1986)

  You Must Remember This (1987)

  American Appetites (1989)

  Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My

  Heart (1990) Black Water (1992)

  Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (199'3) What I Lived For (1994) We Were the Mulvaneys (1996) ??«« Crazj (1997) ykfj Heart Laid Bare (1998) Broke Heart Blues (1999) Blonde (2000)

  Middle Age: A Romance (2001) I'll Take You There (2002) The Tattooed Girl (2003) The Falls (2004) MissingMom (2005) Black Girl, White Girl (2006)

  “ROSAMOND SMITH” NOVELS

  Lives of the Twins (1987)

  Soul/Mate (1989)

  Nemesis (1990)

  Snake Eyes (1992)

  You Can't Catch Me (1995)

  Double Delight (1997)

  Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon (1999)

  The Barrens (2001)

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  By the North Gate (1963)

  Upon the Sweeping Flood SweepingFlood (1966)

  The Wheel of Love (1970)

  Marriages and Infidelities (1972)

  The Goddess and Other Women (1974)

  Hungry Ghosts (1974)

  Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?(1974)

  The Poisoned Kiss (1975)

  The Seduction (1975)

  Crossing the Border (1976)

  Night-Side (1977)

  All the Good People I've Left Behind (1978)

  The Lamb of Abyssalia (1980)

  A Sentimental Education (1980)

  Last Days (1984) Wild Nights (1985)

  Raven's Wing(1986)

  The Assignation (1988)

  Heat (1991)

  Where Is Here?(1992) Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994)

  Zombie (1995)

  “Will You Always Love Me?” (1996) The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the

  Grotesque (1998)

  Faithless (2001) I Am No One You Know (2005)

  High Lonesome: Stories, 1996-2006 (2006)

  The Female of the Species (2006)

  NOVELLAS

  The Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976)

  I Lock My Door upon Myself (1990)

  The Rise of Life on Earth (1991)

  First Love: A Gothic Tale (1996)

  Beasts (2002)

  Rape: A Love Story (2003)

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  Joyce Carol Oates, one of America's most versatile and prolific contemporary writers, was born in the small town of Lockport, New York, on June 16, 1938. She grew up on a farm in nearby Erie County and began writing stories while still in elementary school. As a teenager she devoured works by Faulkner, Dostoyevsky Thoreau, Hemingway, and the Brontes, and soon moved on to D. H. Lawrence, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka. Oates graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Syracuse University in 1960 and was awarded an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. During the 1960s and 1970s she taught English at the University of Detroit and the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. In 1974 she cofounded the Ontario Review with her husband, Raymond Smith. Oates was named a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1978, the same year she became writer-in-residence at Princeton University, where she is currently the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities.

  Oates's first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), the story of a destructive romance between a teenage girl and a thirty-year-old race car driver, foreshadowed her preoccupation with violence and darkness. Her next novel, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), is the opening volume in a quartet about different socioeconomic groups in America that incorporates Expensive People (1968), them (1969), for which she won the National Book Award, and Wonderland (197?). Throughout the 1970s Oates pursued her exploration of American people and institutions in a series of novels that fuse social analysis with vivid psychological portrayals. Wonderland (1971) exposes the shortcomings of the medical world; Do with Me What You Will (1973) centers on the legal profession; The Assassins (197'5) attacks political corruption; Son of the Morning (197'8) tracks the rise and fall of a religious zealot; and Unholy Loves (1979) looks at pettiness and hypocrisy within the academic community. “Like the most important modern writers—-Joyce, Proust, Mann—Oates has an absolute identification with her material: the spirit of a society at a crucial point in its history,” noted Newsweek. Novels such as Childwold (197'6) and Cybele (1979) showcase what Alfred Kazin called “her sweetly brutal sense of what American experience is really like.”

  “Joyce Carol Oates is a fearless writer… [with] impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers,” noted the Los Angeles Times Book Review. During this same period she secured her reputation as a virtuoso of the short story with eight acclaimed collections: By the North Gate (1963), Upon the Sweeping Flood (1966), The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (1970), Marriages and Infidelities (1972), The Goddess and Other Women (1974), Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (1974), The Hungry Ghosts (1974), The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975), The Seduction and Other Stories (1975), Crossing the Border (1976), Night-Side (1977), and All the Good People I've Left Behind (1978). “In the landscape of the contemporary American short story Miss Oates stands out as a master, occupying a preeminent category of her own,” said the Saturday Review. “[Oates] intuitively seems to know that the short story is for a different type of material from the novel: a brief and dazzling plunge in
to another state of consciousness,” remarked Erica Jong. “Miss Oates [is] our poet laureate of schizophrenia, of blasted childhoods, of random acts of violence.” Her stories have been widely anthologized, and she is a three-time winner of the O. Henry Continuing Achievement Award as well as the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Short Story.

  “Joyce Carol Oates is that rarity in American fiction, a writer who seems to grow with each new book,” said Time. She set out in new directions in the 1980s with an acclaimed series of bestselling novels that exploit the conventions of Gothic literature: Bellefleur(1980), A Bloods-moor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984). In addition, she wrote Angel of Light (1981), Solstice (1985), Marya: A Life (1986), You Must Remember This (1987), and American Appetites (1989): a succession of works that make it clear why Commonweal deemed her “the most relentless chronicler of America and its nightmares since Poe.” “Oates's best novels are strongly reminiscent of Faulkner's, especially in their uncompromised vision of the violence her characters visit upon one another and themselves,” said The Washington Post Book World. “Even her humor—and she can be hilariously funny—is mordantly ironical.” Using the pseudonym Rosamond Smith she began writing a series of psychological suspense novels: Lives of the Twins (1987), Soul/Mate (1989), Nemesis (1990), Snake Eyes (1992), You Can't Catch Me (1995), Double Delight (1997), and Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon (1999). Her compilations of short stories continued with The Lamb of Abyssalia (1980), A Sentimental Education (1980), Last Days (1984), Wild Nights (1985), Raven's Wing(1986), and The Assignation (1988). In addition she enjoyed great success with On Boxing (1987), an eloquent meditation on prizefighting.

  “Oates's unblinking curiosity about human nature is one of the great artistic forces of our time,” observed The Nation as her output proliferated throughout the 1990s. Her novels further examined the violence underlying many realities of American culture: racism (Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, 1990), alienation (I Lock My Door upon Myself 1990), poverty (The Rise of Life on Earth, 1991), the interplay of politics and sex (Black Water, 1992), feminism (Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, 1993), success (What I Lived For, 1994), serial killers (Zombie, 1995), family disintegration (We Were the Mulvaneys, 1996), outlaw cults (Man Crazy, 1997), criminality and greed (My Heart Laid Bare, 1998), and fame and celebrity (Broke Heart Blues, 1999, and Blonde, 2000). “A future archaeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America,” said Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “No one knows the darkness of our age, of our own natures, the prison of our narcissism, better than Joyce Carol Oates,” wrote The Washington Post Book World. Her volumes of short stories dating from this period include Heat (1991), Where Is Here? (1992), Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994), “Will You Always Love Me?” (1996), and The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque (1998). “Oates has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces,” stated the Chicago Tribune, and Alice Adams deemed her short fiction “immensely exhilarating, deeply exciting.” In 1994 she received the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in Horror Fiction.

  “Joyce Carol Oates belongs to that small group of writers who keep alive the central ambitions and energies of literature,” said Newsweek. Though best known for short stories and novels, she has also won acclaim for her poetry, essays, and plays. “The best of Miss Oates's poems create a feeling of controlled delirium, verging on nightmare, which is a lyrical counterpart of the rich violence of her novels,” wrote The New York Times Book Review. Her volumes of poetry include Women in Love and Other Poems (1968), Anonymous Sins and Other Poems (1969), Love and Its Derangements (1970), Angel Fire (1973), Dreaming America (1973), The Fabulous Beasts (197'5), Season of'Peril (1977), The Stepfather (1978), Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (1978), Celestial Timepiece (1981), Invisible Woman (1982), The Luxury of Sin (1983), and The Time Traveler (1989). As George Garrett noted: “The bright center of all Joyce Carol Oates's art and craft has always been her poetry.” Her several collections of essays—The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature (1972), New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (197'4), Contraries (1981), The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews (1983), (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988), and Where I've Been, and Where I'm Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose (1999)—display a range of knowledge and interests that explain why she numbers among America's most respected literary and social critics. Oates made a name for herself as a dramatist early in her career with plays such as The Sweet Enemy (1965), Sunday Dinner (191G), Onto-logical Proof of My Existence (1972), and Miracle Play (1974). During the 1990s she resumed writing plays and turned out In Darkest America (1991), I Stand Before You Naked (1991), Gulf War (1992), The Secret Mirror (1992), The Perfectionist (1993), and The Truth-Teller (1993), which have been performed Off-Broadway and at regional theaters across the country.

  “Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most audaciously talented writers,” judged Erica Jong. “Her gift is so large, her fluency in different genres—poems, short stories, novels, essays—so great, that at times she seems to challenge the ability of readers to keep up with her. In an age of specialization she is that rarest of generalists, a woman of letters. She gives her gifts with such abundance and generosity that we may pick and choose, preferring this Oates to that, quibbling about which of her many talents we like best.” John Updike concurred: “Joyce Carol Oates was perhaps born a hundred years too late. She needs a lustier audience, a race of Victorian word-eaters, to be worthy of her astounding productivity, her tireless gift of self-enthrallment. Not since Faulkner has an American writer seemed so mesmerized by a field of imaginary material, and so headstrong in the cultivation of that field.” The New York Times Book Review concluded: “What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something happening on the other side that we'd swear was life itself.”

  Joyce Carol Oates's most recent novels include Middle Age: A Romance (2001), I'll Take You There (2002), The Tattooed Girl (2003), The Falls (2004), Missing Mom (2005), and Black Girl, White Girl (2006).

  CONTENTS

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  INTRODUCTION: The Wonderland Quartet

  by Elaine Showalter

  EXPENSIVE PEOPLE

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  AFTERWORD by Joyce Carol Oates

  INTRODUCTION

  THE WONDERLAND QUARTET

  Elaine Showalter

  As a young writer, Joyce Carol Oates published four remarkable novels, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967); Expensive People (1968), them (1969), and Wonderland (197?). They were all nominated for the National Book Award, and Oates won the award for them in 1970. The novels have been considered as a loosely connected saga of American class struggle in the twentieth century. Oates, in the Afterword to Expensive People, said that they “were conceived … as critiques of America—American culture, American values, American dreams—as well as narratives in which romantic ambitions are confronted by what must be called ‘reality’” In her Afterword to them, Oates described Wonderland'as the book that “thematically ends the informal series, moving … into the yet-uncharted, apocalyptic America of the late Vietnam War period when the idealism of antiwar sentiment had turned to cynicism and the counterculture fantasy… had self-destructed.”

  It makes sense to call these novels the Wonderland Quartet, not only to emphasize their historical connection, but also to suggest that they share elements of the surreal and hallucinatory vision that Oates had highly valued in her favorite childhood book, Alice in Wonderland. Reprinting the series in modern paperback editions nearly forty years after their composition allows us a new perspective on their collective meaning and illuminates their place in Oates's overall career. In the mid-1960s, Oates saw herself as a social realist devoted to chroniclingthe lives of her parents' generation in the Depr
ession, and writing about the marginal and powerless inhabitants of towns like Lockport, New York, where she grew up, and cities like Detroit, where she lived from 1962 to 1967. “Moving to Detroit … changed my life completely,” she has said. “Living in Detroit, enduring the extraordinary racial tensions of that city… made me want to write directly about the serious social concerns of our time.”*

  But rereading the Wonderland Quartet from the distance of a new century, we can see that aesthetic, private, domestic, apolitical, and psychological issues mix with or even dominate Oates's political and public concerns. Alongside class and racial tensions, Oates also dramatizes more coded and perhaps more impassioned preoccupations with the destiny of women, the creative freedom of the woman writer, and the function of art itself. Paradoxically, all four novels use male narrators, the male point of view, or masculine themes—territory many women writers, from Jane Austen on, had deliberately avoided. Moreover, Oates clearly identifies with the longing, frustration, and energy of these male figures; we could even call the series “portraits of the woman artist as a young man.”

  To portray female experience and sexuality, Oates revived the Female Gothic. In the classic eighteenth-century Gothic novel, a young heroine encountered a powerful male, who represented the oppressive but sexually thrilling patriarchal system that imprisoned her in a haunted castle or convent. But the modern Female Gothic is a parable of women writers' fantasies, desires, and nightmares about creativity vs. procreativity—the anxieties of giving birth to stories instead of babies, in a society that viewed female artistic ambition and sexuality as unnatural and deviant. The obsession with monsters and freaks, in the work of Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, was a metaphor for this anxiety, and the mother's body, rather than the haunted castle, is the place of imprisonment, since it represents the fate of women who give in to their sexual desires.