| Review: Joyce Carol Oates, We Were The Mulvaneys |
| We Were The Mulvaneys
by Joyce Carol Oates was my first Oprah Book Club selection and my
third or fourth Oates’ novel, though I chose it because I was
curious to read Oates again after a long hiatus, and only noticed
Oprah’s imprimatur after the fact. I was impressed anew with Oates’ craft. She is a true wordsmith, passionate about words, constructing elegant sentences, paragraphs, chapters. She uses language with precision and command, although not always with efficiency. But then, how can one bear to be efficient with something one loves so well. Reading her prose is like watching Manny Ramirez hit a baseball or Baryshnikov dance. A happy amalgam of congruent synapses that produces an achievement worthy of admiration. Yet, baseballs, though admirably hit, don’t always fly over the fence. Baryshnikov’s ankle can wobble. And good writers, even those with an exceptional command of the craft, don’t always a great, or even a good, novel make. In the past, I’ve found Oates’ novels a hard read. Her characters, though deftly presented, were just that…presented. There seemed to be a distance between Oates and her characters, and one was always aware of that distance. Aware of the character as a character. And at the same time, too aware of Oates. To my way of thinking, readers should only be aware of one thing—not the excellent writing, not the excellent author, not even the excellent story. Readers should be aware of the characters, and through them enter their world. Good fiction is character-driven. There is nothing else the reader needs to be aware of. The characters live. Enough. Except for one thing more. A purpose, a point, a raison d’etre. Otherwise, we might as well forget the book and simply sit down in front of the TV and watch Friends. Which more and more of us seem to be doing. We Were The Mulvaneys has quite a cast, namely the Mulvaneys, a 1950s farm family of six. Oates presents them convincingly, with much focus on Mother Mulvaney, a relentlessly cheerful, good, and unquestioning woman, a sort of June Cleaver in dirty overhauls. But Mrs. Mulvaney is so non-evolving across the years of her distress, I found myself wondering if that was Oates’ intention…to create a maddeningly shallow, self-concerned character. Or instead, was it that old habit of hers? That distance. That holding up of the character for us to see, a question hanging in the air…look at her—isn’t she peculiar? Either way, it prevents one from ‘bonding’ with the character, a condition the author passes from herself to the reader. The story of the Mulvaneys is told to us by the youngest Mulvaney, Judd, although we often find ourselves being told things he couldn’t possibly know—find ourselves inside the heads of various Mulvaneys. Generally, when I’m presented with a narrator telling me a story, I expect to be told something more than simply what happened. I expect a question, a hint of an insight, something—anything—to ponder. But there is nothing to make one ruminate on this novel. Something happens that makes everything go horribly wrong. And then, in the end, everything goes right again. But I couldn’t figure out why. Why things went so wrong or why things righted themselves so completely. I’m sure I didn’t miss something, although I did skim a bit, but just the parts that seemed unnecessary…the detailed directions to High Point Farm, the repetitious parts, of which there are a few. We Were The Mulvaneys is a wonderfully written novel, but its conception is unimpassioned and unexplored. The crux of the Mulvaneys’ demise is gripping and keeps you with the story, but ultimately it isn’t enough. Unless the whole point of the novel is to say that people do things for no reason at all. With no explanation. And with no coming to terms or even a hint of understanding. In other words, a novel more about the theory of chaos than about the Mulvaneys.
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