Expensive People

by Joyce Carol Oates

Book Overview

Joyce Carol Oates's Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In Expensive People, Oates takes a provocative and suspenseful look at the roiling secrets of America's affluent suburbs. Set in the late 1960s, this first-person confession is narrated by Richard Everett, a precocious and obese boy who sees himself as a minor character in the alarming drama unfolding...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812976541
• ISBN13: 9780812976540
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (No Starch)
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.7" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

Chilling Satire

The effect of middle class suburbia on a young boys mind. Over many years he is subjected to his parents ignorance, apathy,and mistakes which they continue to repeat. The boy teeters between sanity and all out madness. Though written in the late 60's the story is just as relevant today. Good chilling satire.

Beautifully Tortured

I adore JCO enough to read a book like this that wanders about and somewhere just past the middle is it's own book. It's own story is right there in the middle, it lasts about 3 pages and it might have been the book. This is an uncomfortable book for any parent to read because we see our own flaws and indulgences, the ridiculousness of schooling and adulthood and the distance we create. But it's beauty makes it less shocking. A wonderful and engrossing read.

one of the finest American novels

Darkly funny, richly allusive, Oates' satire of the upper middle class is a wonderful read. Many Nabokovian resonances.

A flawed but engaging early work by the prolific Oates

Joyce Carol Oates must be one of the most prolific contemporary novelists of our time. Her taste for torrid themes, in particular the brutal and bizarre, are well known. "Expensive People", one of her early works, starts off with a bang. A more direct opening you'll not find. The scene is set. You're instantly captivated and as she reels you in, you succumb and immediately find yourself in Richard Everett's head as he unveils his life story to you...bit by bit. You know you're dealing with dysfunctionality as soon as you meet his parents. There's a seething madness underneath just waiting to get out. If the medium were film, you'll see them cast in grainy black and white. But it isn't. Sad to say, the book loses momentum midway and it becomes tedious. You keep waiting for something to happen and when it does, it's anticlimactic. In the words of Richard, life isn't fiction. Nor is it half as dramatic. Oates is a colourful and engaging writer. She's got craft but has a tendency to indulge herself and when she does, she loses focus. "Expensive People" isn't a conventional thriller. It's a social critique of American society at the turn of the 60s decade and about the falseness of respectable society on the brink of a social revolution that will forever shatter time tested norms. While flawed and not entirely satisfying, it's an impressive early work and Oates got much better by the time she wrote Black Water.

surrealism of suburbia

Joyce Carol Oates writes a Nostradamus-like prediction in "Expensive People". She delves 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 suburbia are chillingly real, in the surrealism that they potray about our middle-America life and the saftey net of support that is purported. In the wake of the events at Columbine high school in Littleton, CO, "Expensive People" is a must read for all of our society to better understand ourselves, and our disenchanted teenagers.

Expensive People is hauntingly dark in its realism and truth

JCO, one of this country's most prolific writers, has written a book that takes what we read in the newspapers and see on the news, into the depths of the mind of how a possible child killer may think, and why he/she would act out the violent aggression that seems to plague so many of our young people today. The brutality of pretension and lies that make people go on a downward spiral to their doom is very well explained in this novel. Upon reading it, we, the readers, come to realize that we are either the fake ones or the desperate ones. Is there a possibility to overcome either side? If not, can we overcome the circumstances of our actions? Maybe. Maybe not.