A review by dllh
We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates

4.0

It's a very slow, sometimes almost tedious read, but it's so remarkably detailed in how it builds up the characters. I think it sags for a while after about the midpoint, and for all that the characters are portrayed complexly, their actions aren't always all that believable to me. The book deals very much in appearances, and the story is told through the voice of a narrator who was young for much of the story's crisis and is retelling it at a distance, having in fact not been present for most of the specific events whose reality rings a bit false for me, so maybe Oates is doing something here with the reliability of the narrator, and these things that are registering for me as lapses in reality are intentional. In any case, it's a nice piece of writing, basically exactly the sort of stuff that Franzen tries to write (in fact, I feel like Freedom maybe owes a little something to this book), but so much better in Oates's hands.