Nessie School of Languages

PLOT

    Joyce Carol Oates?s Expensive
people deals with the dark issue of a totally bankrupt society. She creates
some affluent characters who never feel accepted in the place where they were
born and have their living. As the best example, the son of a successful
businessman and a frustrated wife, who is looking for his own personal freedom
and is led to callous murder that is going to destroy him. We should be
reamrking that the novel was brought out in the fall of 1968, a revolutionary
year which changed the old structures of the world politics and get rid of past
oppressive concepts. Oates presents a moving story of self-destructive
violence, which was perceived as an expression of the radical discontent, the
despair, the bewilderment and outrage of a generation of young and idealistic
Americans confronted by the different kind of country their ancestors had
built, based basically on political hypocrisy and cynicism.

    Some reviewers[1] point
out to the fact that the writer makes us wonder whether murder isn?t just the
best example of political impotence, and crimes of passion the portrayal of
self-destruction. When the child murderer of Expensive People realises
what kind of monster he has become, he shows absolute despair and impotence, as
he has been condemned forever to a world of loneliness and shadows. He was
always of little importance to his mother, so commiting matricied could be a
way of rebellion he had been forced to.

    In a way, the novel seems to
be conceived as a hard critic to the United States, through the disappearance
of the famous American dream which should be taking happiness to every single
household of the country.  We believe
that most of Expensive People is fiction, of course. But there are some
sentences which lead us to think that the writer is telling us a very
outstanding message. For example, when Richard Everett is speaking of his
parents, but he may well be speaking of all the inhabitants of his world when
he confesses: Yes, I loved them.

            The story ends abruptly with death, which seems to be the
straight punishment for having gone beyond the limits of her world..

MAIN ISSUE:

DARK BACKGROUND

    Carol Joyce Oates is said to be one of the
most prolific contemporary American novelists. She seems to have a taste for
passionate themes, in particular the brutal and bizarre. We can?t find a more
direct opening that the one we get in the novel we are trying to review, Expensive
people. The scene is set and the reader is immediately captivated and made
for Richard Everett’s head as he unveils his life story to you little by
little. We, teh readers, feel odd as soon as we meet his parents and get into
their relationship. We keep waiting for something to happen and when it does,
it’s really amazing, althought we feel the callousness of the whole story which
makes us tremble and cry in horror.

    The writer enters deeply and
sympathetically into the mind of a maddened child, and what events and
conditions have played upon this child to reduce him to his psychotic state.
Her description of the society seems 
real, in the surrealism that they portray about American life. In the
own words of Richard, life isn’t fiction. This novel isn’t a conventional
thriller then, it is  a social critique
of American society at the turn of the 60s, and about the falseness of
respectable society on the brink of a social revolution that will forever get
rid of stablished morality norms. In this novel, the writer gets involved in a
deep treatment of universal matters such infanticide, parricide and incest. She
tries to be psychological and analyse their odd behaviours carefully.

    Joyce Carol Oates makes an
effort to get the reader?s attention all the time, sometimes by the use of very
cruel situations.           

MY OWN VIEW

    It?s always interesting to read new
authors, whose names we had never even heard. This is the case of the American woman of letters,
Joyce Carol Oates, who  seems to be a
good writer, as she manages to keep the readers? attention all the time.
Perhaps she abuses of the use of callous situations, although we can understand
that she is trying to portray the wickedness that is inside the human beings.
The bursting of this wickedness can lead to real disaster, and the destruction
of the family union and of a world of supossed normality.

    The issues she develops in this novel are
universal and, it goes without saying, that are interesting for people who love
passionate readings that can move them easily. The murder of parents come to
the readers? minds as something horrible, which is never acceptable. The ideal of a
child murderer threatens the readers and makes them think about the sad reality
which surrounds a large number of people in our modern and comfortable society,
which can?t manage to get rid of poverty, just the opposite, it still keeps
lots of outcast who live next to violence and murder, and whole life are
absolutely meaningless.

    Just to finish, we shall add that names
like Joyce Carol Oartes, John Updike, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Sandra
Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and many more, are the new voices of American
literature. They come from very different backgrounds and ancestry. Some of
them introduced the Hispanic and Asian traditions in American literature, which
has enriched it notably. They are not very well known in our country, though.
It is a same that all these writers don?t get a proper status until an elder
age, as they definitely have a lot to say in today?s cultural development.

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