A review by lindseysparks
Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates

2.0

This was so disappointing. I thought The Garden of Earthly Delights was fantastic and immediately bought the rest of the Wonderland quartet. This starts off with one of the best openings I've ever read - "I was a child murderer." The narrator then begins explaining that he was a child who murdered someone, not someone who murdered a child and he weirdly comes across as charming in these opening pages. I begin expecting something like Lolita - Nabokov does an incredible job of getting in a sick twisted person's head and seeing how a pedophile justifies his actions. Oates does that here with a child murderer, but in both cases the story slumped in the middle. I caught myself skimming several times, which is highly unlike me. This book felt much longer than it is - it's only 224 pages in my Modern Library edition and that's with an afterward, but it felt closer to 500. Maybe ideas like these would work better as short stories? I felt like most of the middle was just repetitive and boring instead of truly developing the characters and helping me get in his head more. I did like how the narrator is writing his memoir and is unreliable - he's telling us his side of the story and trying to explain how he became a murderer, so you can't exactly trust his perspective. Despite these positives, I just did not enjoy reading the book.