Them
by Joyce Carol Oates
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 398)
GR reviewer Tom says "them is not for readers seeking warm, sympathetic characters or spiritual uplift; it's quite an ugly book, though a fascinating and compelling one. You never exactly care for Loretta, Maureen, or Jules, but you sure want to see what happens to them." Unfortunately, around page 260, I stopped wanting to find out what happened. I didn't mind if they all ended up going to Woodstock and scoring bad acid and drowning in one of those photogenic mudbaths. It had been som...more
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Read in August, 2007
As a stranger in the World According to Joyce Carol Oates, I established one essential fact in reading them: The woman is indeed a superb writer. From page one, this novel (published when Oates was 31), pulls you in with its confident rhythms, sharp dialogue, and natural storytelling ease. It's the sordid and surreal chronicle of a "white trash" family in Detroit, spanning the years 1937 to 1967. Loretta Wendall is the family's crude, optimistic matriarch; her children Maureen a...more
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Read in July, 2006
What can you say about JCO? The most prolific great novelist of our times. She's written probably over a hundred books, all illustrating her depth and wisdom as a writer. She's taken modern icons and major headlines, from the life of Marilyn Monroe and Ted Kennedy to the race riots of the sixties, but mainly she's gone behind the scenes of peoples' private lives, to illustrate through literally hundreds of short stories and dozens of novels her breadth and scope of knowledge and attention to the...more
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Read in June, 2008
recommended to Lola by:
Kate K.
them is like nothing I've ever read, really. Sometimes I feel like Oates is describing another planet. Maybe it's just another century.
As a reading experience, though, I'm tempted to compare it to The Corrections. Both are sprawling, absorbing realistic novels with a similar project: to explore the lives of ordinary people so deeply and precisely that the reader realizes there are no ordinary people. These characters are as alive as you and me, and as remarkable, tragic, surpr...more
As a reading experience, though, I'm tempted to compare it to The Corrections. Both are sprawling, absorbing realistic novels with a similar project: to explore the lives of ordinary people so deeply and precisely that the reader realizes there are no ordinary people. These characters are as alive as you and me, and as remarkable, tragic, surpr...more
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Read in December, 2007
The more of Oates's novels I read, the more I like her: this one synthesizes most of her thematic interests into a sweeping intergenerational saga that expands and compresses time. Sudden violence visits the characters: the novel begins with a postcoital murder; one of the novel's central personalities spends a good third of the narrative catatonic in a hospital, while another is abruptly shot at the end of a chapter, at the most unexpected moment.
The novel's historical sensibility is joyous...more
The novel's historical sensibility is joyous...more
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Read in February, 2006
This is the book that made me fall in love with Joyce Carol Oates. This book follows the course of a family through the generations and was the book that helped me realize that I was doomed to a life like my mother's (and my grandmother's) unless I started paying attention! The cycle of life poorly lived is so clearly detailed. The characters are tragic and easily identified just by looking around you in any depressed area. They may even be in your own family. You don't read Joyce Carol Oates if...more
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Read in February, 2008
I randomly picked this one out of the Sunset library and I'm really glad I did. Oates is a gifted writer. In this book, which is apparently a part of a trilogy or quartet? Oates writes about life in the Detroit projects in the 1960's. Part of the reason she is able to do it so successfully is because she draws upon biographical material from one of her former students'. I recommend this book and I'll definitely look for the rest of the books when I get my shit together.
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Read in December, 2006
i began reading this book, my first time reading joyce carol oates, but, sadly, i had to return it before i had the time to finish it. the book follows a family not faring so well in mid-century america, and by virtue of her talent, j.c.o. manages to make all of the ugliness, the ignorance, the cruelty, the poverty, the tragedy extremely compelling and beautiful. the characters are human, complex and real.
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Read in January, 1997
I like the Wonderland quartet--mostly because I like the fact that they are involving history. Again--JCO's obsession with the destruction of family units (and the attempts to make something that seems transient at best, permanent). Here the whole focus is NEW though--and though she would return to the same subject matter with a better sense of prose, never would it seem like it took so many risks again.
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Read in September, 2002
This is apparently based on a true family of a student that Joyce Carol Oates had in class. I think of this book often while working at TCFS and hearing some dysfunctional stories I think are very unfortunate. Families just set out to destroy each other sometimes. That's what this book is about.
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I looked for this in our library system (which has like 10 libraries around the townships within like an hour of each other) and none of them think this book exists. In fact, they don't even know who Joyce Carol Oates is.
But she is a real person!! I have met her! *smacks library system*
But she is a real person!! I have met her! *smacks library system*
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Read in January, 1996
I read this in Austin. I remember doing this on a beautiful day Les Ami (RIP). I hated the cover and put a photo of a Genie on instead. The book was good, impeccable, but I think she is better in smaller doses than a long novel like this. I have gone to Detroit since.
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Read in January, 2007
recommends it for:
detroiters
what it's like to be poor and white in the city of detroit from the 1950's until the riots in '67. dark and twisted, based off letters written to Joyce Carol Oates from a former student. eyeopening.
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I found this book among my grandmothers things after she had passed away. Ironically, it tells the story of a woman trapped by her husband, over powering mother-in-law and used by her children....
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This may be my absolute favorite contemporary novel of all time, even though it has some missteps and shortcomings. I've never felt so involved in a book before.
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Read in January, 2006
A bleak view of the industrial northern midwest. I was intrigued with the bleakness knowing that this world existed just a few miles from where I sit now.
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Read in December, 1974
Fascinating Read. First read while pregnent with my firstborn, Katie. Left me feeling nauseous at times, but a very good book.
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You know those library books that haven't been checked out in ten years and smell kinda musty? I hate novels like that.
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Read in February, 2008
I really liked the first 2/3 of this book...after that it got boring and I was just looking forward to it ending.
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Read in January, 2000
one of my favorite joyce carol oates books... and damn, are there TONS from which to choose!
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