We Were the Mulvaneys

Product Information

Ms. Oates, who is childless, dedicates her novel to "my" Mulvaneys. But you don't need to have a large family to appreciate this emotionally charged story. For Joyce Carol Oates is a truly gifted storyteller who artfully handles multi-charactered and multi-layered pieces of fiction. An extraordinary woman of letters, Ms. Oates has also authored twenty-one volumes of short stories and more than a dozen works of non-fiction. This, combined with her twenty-five previous novels, adds up to more than fifty books by a fifty-seven-year-old woman. Writing makes Oates melancholy, especially towards the end of a book, when the momentum propels her through 10-hour days. She needs to surround herself with people to relax. So it was that, in spite of disliking most television and finding popular culture "debased", Oates took to Oprah's Book Club in a way some of her younger, more modish literary peers did not. In Oprah's world, readers don't read; they stay up all night sobbing their way through a book and then write to its author in the morning. "I found that very wonderful and very surprising," says Oates, blinking her great marble eyes. "Since I'm a literary person, I look upon books as texts that have been imagined and written. But the general reading public looks upon books as documents of reality, and so the people on Oprah would say, for instance, 'I have a mother just like that.' Or, 'My father was just like that.' Or, 'This happened to me.' They don't seem to perceive - nor do they wish to perceive - that this is a novel. I think if they had, for instance, a class on Shakespeare's Hamlet, they would say, 'Gertrude is just like my mother; Hamlet's like my brother; Ophelia, that's my story.' And they would get a lot of emotion out of that." She falters. There is nothing wrong with reading as therapy, but there is something perhaps painful to an author in seeing readers gobble up their books as an excuse to "basically talk about themselves". Oates's eyelashes lower. "Of course, one doesn't want to dampen that enthusiasm." I believe in uttering the truth, even if it hurts us. Particularly if it hurts us.” (Part 1, “Storybook House”) Imagery

McCauley, C. (2001). Daring to Care: Joyce Carol Oates's We Were the Mulvaneys. Contemporary Literature, 42(2), 337-352. In conclusion, summarize your reading experience with We Were the Mulvaneys. What grade would you give this novel? If Marianne’s rape happened today instead of in the mid-1970s, would the impact on the family and on her life have been very different? What if the Mulvaney?s lived in a big city instead of in a small town —would the rape have a different “meaning”?However, his failure is still to be regarded as a failure. By failing to allow his own daughter to grieve in her own way, he betrays her. She needs a stable support system, but instead he makes her into a loner and a vagrant. She has to deal with the trauma alone.

Button, our sweet innocent victim in this story, shows no personal growth because she doesn’t understand that what has been done to her is wrong. She doesn’t seem to get that the initial act that causes all of this is wrong and she doesn’t understand that her father’s reaction is wrong. She just goes about her life thinking this is just the way things are and she never seeks help for the emotional damage that is so evident to the readers. The motif of memory and reflection is prevalent throughout the novel, highlighting the characters' struggles to come to terms with the past. Oates skillfully weaves these techniques together, creating a multi-layered narrative that invites readers to explore the complexities of human experience. But rewarding because I found the structure of the story, though it reads smoothly, is exciting, and is quite frankly a wonderful sort of book for “Oprah’s Book Club”, is at the same time disconcertingly and unexpectedly complex. (To me, at any rate.) The reader should know that this novel is concerned with violent sexual assault, which may be severely triggering for victims of abuse. After Marianne leaves, the family slowly dissolves. Mike Jr. moves out of the house, living in town and working for Mulvaney Roofing. He drinks and hangs around with a wild crowd, arguing constantly with his father. After a car accident which he survives, but which does serious injury to his fiancée, who is riding with him, Mike Jr. joins the Marines and is seldom heard from throughout the rest of the novel.Sometimes, when reviewing a book, it's easier to explain the experience you had while reading it - so that's what I'm going to do with "We Were the Mulvaneys". Profoundly cathartic, this extraordinary novel unfolds as if Oates, in plumbing the darkness of the human spirit, has come upon a source of light at its core. Moving away from the dark tone of her more recent masterpieces, Joyce Carol Oates turns the tale of a family struggling to cope with its fall from grace into a deeply moving and unforgettable account of the vigor of hope and the power of love to prevail over suffering.

Her latest book, Middle Age: A Romance, introduces just such a character, Adam Berendt, who dies trying to save a young girl from drowning. Berendt enters the wealthy New York suburb of Salthill-on-Hudson and, through the pureness of his heart, persuades its avaricious residents that it is not too late to change. Middle Age is intensely realistic, a facsimile of fraught modern America, particularly the women in it, "who are accustomed to not seeing imperfections in men, though anxiously aware of the smallest imperfections in themselves". Oates was amazed when some critics read it as a piece of satire. "When most people write about the suburbs of America, particularly the women of the upper middle class, they're very satirical and harsh. But I know these women and I see no justification for being cruel to them. They're actually very wonderful people. Some reviewer made the point that the characters were despicable, but that the author showed compassion for them, whereas I didn't feel they were despicable at all. In a world in which there are serial killers and genocide, these people are basically well intentioned." I asked one of my friends to recommend a good book to close out the year, and this is what she suggested. And just...wow! This was a superb read. The writing was impeccable and the story was riveting. I’ve always wanted to read something by Joyce Carol Oates, and I’m so glad to be able to say I finally did. As readers journey alongside the Mulvaneys through their triumphs and tribulations, they are reminded that life's challenges can transform individuals and families, highlighting the resilience and capacity for growth within each person. Oates masterfully crafts a narrative that resonates with the shared human experience, leaving a lasting impact on those who engage with the novel's powerful themes and evocative storytelling. If you are also looking for a book with easily identifiable heroes and villans to relate to, cheer for and boo and hiss at, then again, this is not a book for you. The characters Oates' draws are human, with all their flaws and weaknesses. Every single one of them is unpredictable, at time unfathomable, at times loveable, and at time detestable. Just like life itself.Marianne, who at this reunion (now in her early thirties, Michael her father dead) appears with two children and her husband Will, having finally found herself in a life that seemed to be taken away from her by the years of separation, infrequent communication with her mother and siblings, and total rejection by her father who in his own mind still loved her but couldn’t bear the thinking of her or of what had happened or of what she had done or of what he had done. And as Judd writes of this reunion, “I saw that Marianne was in the prime of her young womanhood … color restored … a fullness to her face … the liquidy yearning in the eyes eased … and her life independent of all Mulvaneys if she should wish it.” The Mulvaneys are blessed by all that makes life sweet. But something happens on Valentine’s Day, 1976—an incident that is hushed up in the town and never spoken of in the Mulvaney home—that rends the fabric of their family life…with tragic consequences. Years later, the youngest son attempts to piece together the fragments of the Mulvaneys’ former glory, seeking to uncover and understand the secret violation that brought about the family’s tragic downfall. Puoi avere un solo figlio miracoloso. Se sei fortunato. Però molta gente non lo è. (Quindi non dovete gongolare, è ovvio) Corinne does not reject Marianne. She chooses her husband over her daughter out of desperation and must live with that choice. But she never ceases loving, and grieving over, Marianne, the child most like herself.