Expensive People

Expensive People
First Edition
AuthorJoyce Carol Oates
LanguageEnglish
Genrenovel
PublisherVanguard Press
Publication date
1968
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (hardback)
Pages308
ISBN978-0814901700

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

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

  1. ^ Johnson, 1994 pp. 218-222: Selected Bibliography, Primary Works
  2. ^ Creighton, 1979 pp. 161-169: Selected Bibliography
  3. ^ Johnson, 1987 p. 15: Lowercase for “them” is correct.
  4. ^ Creighton, 1979 p. 55, p. 56: “...highly subjective first-person narrator…”
  5. ^ Creighton, 1979 p. 55-63: Extended plot synopsis.
  6. ^ Johnson, 1987 p. 52-54: Plot sketch
  7. ^ Knowles, 1997
  8. ^ Johnson, 1987 p. 49
  9. ^ Creighton, 1979 p. 56: Richard “has all the bias of a highly subjective first-person narrator..”
  10. ^ Johnson, 1987 p. 52: “...a dazzling Nabokovian artifice…”, p. 52
  11. ^ Johnson, 1987 p. 51-52: Oates on “comic” aspects. And p. 52: blockquote material
  12. ^ Johnson, 1987 p. 51
  13. ^ Creighton, 1979 p. 56
  14. ^ Creighton, 1979 p. 59, p. 163: Selected Bibliography

Sources

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