Possibly The Novel Upon Which Oates Built Her Reputation

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	• Them (Modern Library) Joyce Carol Oates Modern Library, 2006 - 576 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The only kind of fiction that is real

As writer Joyce Carol Oates states in the introduction of her "them", this book is `the only kind of fiction that is real'. The gimmick in this book is that she tells the story as if it were reality. According to her early note, the narrative is based on some letters she received from a former student. This so-called student wasn't a good writer, but she thought her story worthy telling therefore her teacher assumed the task.

The student is Maureen Wendal, one of `them'. The narrative is about her and her mother, Loretta, and her older brother Jules. Oates follows a couple of years in the lives of these people. In their lives there are many ingredients that could turn the novel into a soap opera -- rape, love, lies, prostitution --, but this writer does not deals with the cheap prose. Her sentences are crafted, and her characters thoroughly developed, making all of them very real.

Political and historic background lend the book more relevance. The famous Detroit riots in the middle 60's are part of these lives. Oates seems to be interested in the subtle relationship between reality and fiction. She borrows `real' lives to construct fiction that has as basis real facts that change the lives of her characters.

As she points out in her introduction, nothing in the novel was exaggerated in order to increase the drama. Not matter if her work is real or not -- this is not her point, after all -- the fact is that she wrote an incredibly good book populated with fictional characters that read like real. And this is more than any reader can long for.

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Great Writing, so-so story

To read this book is a pure pleasure. The writing is amazing, descriptive but not so much that your imagination is constricted. The characters are so complex and well developed, it makes reading along with them realistic and enjoyable. However, this is one of those "good" books with a depressing plot. That's how I would describe it, depressing. Over the course of the book things just keep getting worse, and at the very end - well, I won't give anything away. If you're the type of person who likes to watch movies like "Schindler's List", extremely well done but emotionally taxing, then you'll love this book.
One thing I was amazed at, however, was how Oates talked about things I have never before read in a book for school. She doesn't use any euphimisms, that's for sure. I suggest you read it, overall the writing and powerful emotions conveyed to the reader are far more amazing than anything else I have ever read.

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Realism stretched like putty

Perhaps the greatest trick which Oates performs in Them is her ability to take emotions which human beings have been examining for centuries, like love, and pull them apart, elongate them to such an extent that they are barely recognizable from their pedestrian definitions. There is an excruciating, unrelenting quality to Them, and it is found in this inscrutable ability to take the banal and make it rich, painful, grotesque. This novel of great pain laid bare is not so much an exercise in exposing human universals, but showing how distressingly small human concerns are; in the great sweep of events little people remain little, no matter how large their emotions.

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Possibly The Novel Upon Which Oates Built Her Reputation

Jules, Loretta, and Maureen Wendall are three of the most tormented and tormenting characters from modern American literature. These people, even Loretta but especially Maureen, have the capacity to advance themselves beyond their lower-class roots, yet each allows himself or herself to be doomed not just by the turmoil of events outside their lives, but by the limitations of their own personalities.

When Oates composed this aggressively frustrating novel some forty years ago, the material about which she wrote--whites living in poverty relocating from a rural setting to the Mecca of Detroit--was revolutionary and ground-breaking. The murders, sexual assaults, cruelty, kidnapping, government corruption, even the undermining of the American Dream, was all presented without dramatic enhancement or judgment, it was simply spoken of as any other event would be. This lack of commentary on the part of the author makes all that comes to pass within "them" so much more startling. Unlike many of her later forays into fantasy, this novel aches within the confines of the realism with which she wrote it.

Beginning with a cold blooded slaying in a bed and ending thirty years later in the ashes of the Detroit riots, "them" reconstructs much of the unpleasant side of mid-century American lower class life. Time and again we see glimmers of hope for Jules and Maureen, and (starting with the move to Detroit itself) for Loretta, and in every case---but one---we watch as the characters themselves let the chances go unused, or worse, warp them past recognition.

The novel "them" is powerful and disconcertingly real. The fact its author tells us about such terrible things in literary prose makes it seem all the more offensive to our sense of complacency.

The chapter near the end in which Maureen Wendall writes a letter to her teacher, Joyce Carol Oates, might confuse many, but this, too, is a literary construct, and represents an unusual Oatesean technique, a kind of letting the story rupture and protrude outward into what we think of as "our" world.

It's been a dozen years since I first read this novel and to this day I think it stands out more than any other Oates work as her most alluring trip into the superconsciousness of the twentieth-century American nation.

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makes me want to shoot myself...

... but I love this book. jules, maureen and loretta are the most foolish, pathetic and delusional narrarators that you will ever come across. almost every sentence is painful and will make you want to slap some sense into them. unfortunately, after a while you wind up thinking like them, and in the end you actually agree with their unsettling point of view. This book will haunt you..

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Joyce Carol Oates?s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. As powerful and relevant today as it on its initial publication, them chronicles the tumultuous lives of a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, from the 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her ?potent, life-gripping imagination,? Oates traces the aspirations and struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who is filled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequent destinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight to survive in a world of violence and danger.

Winner of the National Book Award, them is an enthralling novel about love, class, race, and the inhumanity of urban life. It is, raves The New York Times, ?a superbly accomplished vision.?

Them is the third novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.

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