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A review by kingabee
We Were The Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
5.0
One thing for sure – Oates can write. Her Twitter antics might convince you she is not a serious writer, but she is.
We Were The Mulvaneys is a juicy novel with quite a selection of antiheroes that creep up on you slowly, and you’re not sure when exactly you started hating them.
The Mulvaneys are the golden family which gets undone by their own misogyny, bigotry and weakness of character. The biggest asshat, of course, is the father, who believes that the offense done to his daughter was done to him really by proxy. It was an attack on him, something was taken away from him. The community whose respect he tried to earn so hard committed the ultimate act betrayal and disrespect. Like so many backwards fathers, he thinks his daughter’s virginity belongs to him. So any crime committed against her is actually committed against him and his property. The father’s unhealthy obsession with female virginity can be noticed very early on, when he is courting his future wife.
The novel is so psychologically intricate – Oates documents all the little things, the minute failures in communication that build up until everything reaches the point of no return. I particularly enjoyed the description of how the family communicates through their pets in a way of avoiding having difficult conversations. The daughter’s only act of rebellion noted was this one time when she broke from this established form of communication and snapped at her mother. It was such a small thing, but it left ripples. As a person with an easy access to her store of anger and rage, I found the mother’s and daughter’s inability to get angry perplexing and frustrating, but possibly, understandable in its context.
It was also interesting how the whole family, the parents especially, believed their own hype of being this picture perfect unit, the embodiment of the American dream, whereas to this reader they didn’t seem that special to begin with, therefore their downfall wasn’t as surprising as it was to them. When the reality started contradicting their own image they built in their heads, well, that’s too bad for reality. We never actually see the family through any outsider’s eyes, so we have no idea if their opinion of themselves is shared by their neighbours or if it’s just some group delusion.
The book is written from the POV of Judd, the youngest child of the Mulvaneys. This narrator occasionally becomes omniscient, he remembers things he wasn’t around for. This structure might sound messy, but was in fact very intricate, ellipting the main event, which nonetheless overshadows the whole story to the end.
We Were The Mulvaneys is a juicy novel with quite a selection of antiheroes that creep up on you slowly, and you’re not sure when exactly you started hating them.
The Mulvaneys are the golden family which gets undone by their own misogyny, bigotry and weakness of character. The biggest asshat, of course, is the father, who believes that the offense done to his daughter was done to him really by proxy. It was an attack on him, something was taken away from him. The community whose respect he tried to earn so hard committed the ultimate act betrayal and disrespect. Like so many backwards fathers, he thinks his daughter’s virginity belongs to him. So any crime committed against her is actually committed against him and his property. The father’s unhealthy obsession with female virginity can be noticed very early on, when he is courting his future wife.
The novel is so psychologically intricate – Oates documents all the little things, the minute failures in communication that build up until everything reaches the point of no return. I particularly enjoyed the description of how the family communicates through their pets in a way of avoiding having difficult conversations. The daughter’s only act of rebellion noted was this one time when she broke from this established form of communication and snapped at her mother. It was such a small thing, but it left ripples. As a person with an easy access to her store of anger and rage, I found the mother’s and daughter’s inability to get angry perplexing and frustrating, but possibly, understandable in its context.
It was also interesting how the whole family, the parents especially, believed their own hype of being this picture perfect unit, the embodiment of the American dream, whereas to this reader they didn’t seem that special to begin with, therefore their downfall wasn’t as surprising as it was to them. When the reality started contradicting their own image they built in their heads, well, that’s too bad for reality. We never actually see the family through any outsider’s eyes, so we have no idea if their opinion of themselves is shared by their neighbours or if it’s just some group delusion.
The book is written from the POV of Judd, the youngest child of the Mulvaneys. This narrator occasionally becomes omniscient, he remembers things he wasn’t around for. This structure might sound messy, but was in fact very intricate, ellipting the main event, which nonetheless overshadows the whole story to the end.