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them (Wonderland Quartet #3)

by Joyce Carol Oates, Elaine Showalter (Introduction)

3.68 of 5 stars 3.68 · rating details · 1,471 ratings · 143 reviews

From the 1930s through the race riots of 1967, the members of the Wendall family, living in inner-city Detroit, struggle to understand the obscure forces constantly tearing at their lives and happiness. Winner of the National Book Award.

'When Miss Oates' potent, lifegripping imagination and her skill at narrative are conjoined, as they are pre-eminently in THEM, she is a p...more

Paperback, 576 pages

Published September 12th 2006 by Modern Library (first published 1969)

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Nov 23, 2012 Paul rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

Around page 260, I stopped wanting to find out what happened to this miserable crew. I didn't mind if they all ended up going to Woodstock and scoring bad acid and drowning in one of those photogenic mudbaths. In fact - yay, way to go. It had been something of a struggle to bother about these people to begin with.
The novel is based on the life of the Maureen character.
Maureen was a real person. JCO met her round about 1962, she was a student in JCO's evening class at the University of Detroit....more Around page 260, I stopped wanting to find out what happened to this miserable crew. I didn't mind if they all ended up going to Woodstock and scoring bad acid and drowning in one of those photogenic mudbaths. In fact - yay, way to go. It had been something of a struggle to bother about these people to begin with.
The novel is based on the life of the Maureen character.
Maureen was a real person. JCO met her round about 1962, she was a student in JCO's evening class at the University of Detroit. JCO discovered Maureen's "terrible obsession with her personal history" and JCO became fascinated herself and had a lightbulb-over-head moment and wrote the whole thing out in her greatly detailed patented helter-skelter deadpan and then and then and then style. So it's a non-fiction novel, or whatever these things are called. The trouble is that many of the extraordinary twists which happen to the three main characters Loretta and her children Jules and Maureen are unexplained, maybe inexplicable. They zap right on like a drive by shooting. JCO is a drive by writer. For instance Maureen at age 16, having had NO boyfriends and ZERO sexual experience, becomes a kind of hooker for a while, accepting lifts from guys and sleeping with them for money in motels. Huh? So, er, why did she do it? Did she think of the first guy as a boyfriend? Seems that her entire motivation was to get money to enable her to leave an oppressive family household where she was treated like a skivvy. Would a girl in 1954 really do this? Out of the blue start sleeping with guys for money, and all her own idea? It didn't seem real at all, but of course the point of "them" the novel is that it's not actually fiction, it's all entirely true. The truth is stranger than fiction, JCO may say, but I think it is incumbent on JCO to offer SOME interpretation instead of just kind of shrugging and moving on breathlessly to the next weird thing.
Anyway after 260 pages I couldn't take any more of this endless stream of banality invigorated by the odd jolt of unexplained violence. This was an early JCO - much much much better was to come.(less)

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Jul 30, 2007 Tom rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 and Jules struggle...more

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May 15, 2012 Al rated it 2 of 5 stars

This overly long book was alternately boring, fascinating, repelling and maddening. Ms. Oates follows the lives of a family -- mother, daughter and son -- living in poverty in urban Detroit in the fifties and sixties. Based, according to her, on actual events, the book chronicles the traumatic lives they led, with what, to me at least, is an excess of imaginative reconstruction of nearly every thought these individuals must have had while the events were transpiring. Or maybe I should say MIGHT...more

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Jan 02, 2011 Withanhauser rated it 3 of 5 stars

Oates’ them is a contextual book—that is, one indelibly wedded to its time and subject: mid-20th century, urban America, and poor white people. them was written in 1967 and 1968, and published in 1969, and much of the book’s content—specifically, its culmination—occurs during the 1960’s. In writing them, Oates is trying to create an epochal book while also relating the circumstances and lives of poor people, especially poor women, during that time.

What structures and shapes the lives of poor, wh...more Oates’ them is a contextual book—that is, one indelibly wedded to its time and subject: mid-20th century, urban America, and poor white people. them was written in 1967 and 1968, and published in 1969, and much of the book’s content—specifically, its culmination—occurs during the 1960’s. In writing them, Oates is trying to create an epochal book while also relating the circumstances and lives of poor people, especially poor women, during that time.

What structures and shapes the lives of poor, white people? In Oates’ opinion: love and money. In the Afterword of them, the author comments that she considered entitling them, Love and Money, but thankfully saw this title as “too rawly thematic and reductive”. But though Oates is averse to simplifying them to just these topics, they are what truly comprise the bulk of the novel. Each of Oates’ three protagonists—Jules, Loretta, and Maureen—is attempting to escape poverty and secure love. And, to each, the two are seemingly inextricably linked. Maureen, the daughter of the Wendall family, believes that physical love is the only method through which poor women can join the middle class. Jules, the eldest son of the Wendall family, attempts to transcend the circumstances of poverty—and life, in general—through his all-consuming love of Nadine. And, Loretta, who finds and quickly loses love at the book’s outset in weedy teen Bernie Malin, spends the rest of the novel trying to retrieve it in the guise of abusive men.

In addition to delving into the circumstances and motives of poor white people, Oates tries to highlight the plight of women. All of Oates’ protagonists from the Wendall family are passive beings, subject to the actions—and misdeeds—of others. While Jules, despite his own detached negligence, is propelled by the inexplicable goodwill and love of others, Maureen and Loretta flounder through life, subjugated and exploited by men. When they do assert themselves, they are resigned to do so through the channels and limitations of their chauvinistic society, and find themselves rebuffed and broken as a result. Thus, Maureen seeks financial security through prostitution, and is savagely beaten by her stepfather for doing so; while, Jules, alternately, drops out of high school only to be offered promising employment by his uncle, Samson. At the close of the novel, we are left with the sense that Jules, regardless of what he does, will find prosperity and security, while Maureen will cling to a life of compromise and concession.

Oates characters all exude a hardness befitting of their difficulties and woe. Each character tries to take control of their lives, and seeks certainty and security. But neither of these items is really tenable for them. Given this, each slowly resigns themselves to either dissatisfaction or fate.

Though them was unique for considering the plight of a perhaps neglected group, and delving into the inequities and hopelessness extant in post-WW II America, it also falls into the genre of familial strife fiction. When viewed solely as a member of this latter category, them is overwritten and somewhat extraneous. Maybe I’m just still tired of this topic since reading The Corrections earlier in the year, but I feel like unless someone writes about this subject with great deft and depth, I’m not very interested.
(less)

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Mar 15, 2010 Dorothy rated it 3 of 5 stars

3.5 stars. As I finish my time at Princeton, I figured I should introduce myself to the work of Joyce Carol Oates. Beginning with a simple search on Amazon.com, I quickly learned how prolific an author she is. Ultimately, I choose two of her most famous works ("them" and "What I lived for") based on the fact that they were each Pulitzer-nominated.

"them" is a tale with roots from JCO's time pre-Princeton, when she was working at a college in Detroit. The central character is a woman who sat in o...more

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Sep 20, 2009 emily rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: who? huh? was I saying something?

I honestly don't get it.

This is a book in which every character, all the time, is confused. At first, I thought maybe Ms Oates was not quite so sympathetic an observer as she thinks she is and that she may just think that her poor characters are poor because they're dumb. But no! The non-poor characters are just as befuddled. I have no idea how they get through their days. These people are constantly surrounded by a world that mystifies them, and they seem unable to remember things like where th...more

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May 28, 2012 Julie Garbutt rated it 4 of 5 stars

"As soon as she read the first page of a novel... she was pleased, startled, excited to know that this was real, the world of this novel."

"She could draw near to a man and through half-closed eyes assess him, never really looking at him; it was a feeling in her blood."

"There were certain cycles to go through. The cycle had begun when he had opened the door of his car for her, and in a minute or two it would end with his sudden paralyzed tension, his broken breath against her face, the familiar u...more

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Jun 16, 2009 Alison rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I'm not really sure what I thought of this book - I didn't quite like it, but it was better than just OK (I'd prefer to give it 2.5 stars). Part of this is probably because I read most of it while I was a little out of it over the weekend, due to my poor (nonexistent?) ability to deal with the humidity & heat down here. I probably owe it a re-read someday.

Anyway, this is the third book in Oates' Wonderland series. This one follows members of the Wendall family -- mom Loretta, daughter Mauree...more

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May 22, 2011 Northpapers rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Joyce Carol Oates is the Tom Waits of highbrow pulp fiction.

My friend Jonathan Kotulski made the above statement, mostly in jest I think, during a recent phone conversation.

We had been talking about Kafka, Musil, Borges, and David Foster Wallace, then I mentioned that I was still feverishly reading novels and short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, and that I didn't completely understand why. The Tom Waits comparison came from the fact that she has produced a huge catalog, and managed to stay consis...more Joyce Carol Oates is the Tom Waits of highbrow pulp fiction.

My friend Jonathan Kotulski made the above statement, mostly in jest I think, during a recent phone conversation.

We had been talking about Kafka, Musil, Borges, and David Foster Wallace, then I mentioned that I was still feverishly reading novels and short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, and that I didn't completely understand why. The Tom Waits comparison came from the fact that she has produced a huge catalog, and managed to stay consistently challenging over the course of several decades.

My most recent JCO book is actually one of her earlier works. As illustrated boldly in the picture above, it is named Them. The title, which actually does help in the interpretation of the book, does very little to tell you what you are about to read. Nor does the illustration. Nor do maybe the first 400 pages, over the course of which a quarreling, unlikable family staggers through two generations of rapes, murders, beatings, racism, domestic violence, abandonment, bereavement, rebellion, infidelity, alcoholism, obesity, and cancer.

In general, I found the book to be melodramatic, overdrawn, miserable, and taxing. However, there are two tricks JCO pulls, which although they struck me as a little cheap at the time, in retrospect help to tie the thing together and make its reading worthwhile.

The first trick she plays twice. In her intro, she bills the story "a work of history in fictional form." Later in the novel, she prints several letters written by one of the protagonists to herself. She artfully pleads with her readers to accept that, "This is the only kind of fiction that is real."

The second trick, which is complicated by the first, is a bit of a deus ex machina, but in my opinion, it works. The history of the minor characters in the novel is, without much set-up or warning, suddenly linked to major historical events, and everything changes. Which I guess is how major historical events interact with the urban poor, striking without warning. The whole book, the characters seem like anonymous cogs in a big, crushing wheel, then without much warning or setup, the axle breaks.

So at the end of Them, readers are confronted with a story that seems too bad to be true, with a twist that seems too big to be true, yet the author repeateadly claims that the badness and bigness are both historical fact.

As a reader, I love stuff like this. It places me on a precipice. I am cynical, but as P.T. Anderson reminds pomo cynics in Magnolia, "These things happen."

I rarely encounter books that engage me in a struggle, that effectively prod me to reframe, or restate, how I think about the world, its workings, and my connection to them, but Them is one such book. And that doesn't mean I like all the grand gestures, the melodramatic sexual drama, the barrage of tragedies, or the absorption with violence and tension, but like they do in all JCO books, these things fill a space worth exploring, even if they leave me feeling ambivalent and more than a little disturbed.(less)

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May 31, 2009 Jean rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is the 3rd novel in the quartet of the Wonderland Series, and not having read the other books, I was unsure as to whether I would be able to pick this up and "catch on". Never fear...Joyce carol Oates does it right. You can read this book and not have ever even heard of the others and still enjoy it on its own! She takes you back to the 5o's in Detroit and lets you see and feel how it was to be poor and struggling in those days. It's about race, class, family, love, urban life, marriage, wo...more

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Jun 01, 2009 Rachel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Joyce Carol Oates is an author I have come to love. I start to read one of her books and I cannot stop. I fall into her stories, her characters, her narrative. This book is no different. It is an epic tale of a family plagued by murder, death, spousal beatings, child abuse, prostitution and fire. Oh, and a riot. This is not even including the dashed hopes, lowered expectations, poverty and general sanity. The author gives us a lot of inner dialogue, and I wonder, does she think everyone is insan...more

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Dec 16, 2009 Katy Major rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: only the most determined of readers

Shelves: 2009, heavy, highland-library, dark, fiction, classics

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The first book I read by Joyce Carol Oates was "Blonde," a book told from the point of view of Marilyn Monroe. I read it in eighth grade. Unfortunately, it was extremely violent and sexually graphic, and I was very put off and disturbed by it. However, I did notice Oates' sparse, emotional prose, and was fascinated by it. I've put quite a few of Oates' novels on my "to-read" shelf and have been waiting to read one. "them" was the one that I picked up.

My favorite part of the book was the beginnin...more The first book I read by Joyce Carol Oates was "Blonde," a book told from the point of view of Marilyn Monroe. I read it in eighth grade. Unfortunately, it was extremely violent and sexually graphic, and I was very put off and disturbed by it. However, I did notice Oates' sparse, emotional prose, and was fascinated by it. I've put quite a few of Oates' novels on my "to-read" shelf and have been waiting to read one. "them" was the one that I picked up.

My favorite part of the book was the beginning. Loretta is sixteen, and idealistic. In the space of a few hours (and less than fifty pages!), Loretta loses her virginity to her crush, deals with the trauma of said crush being shot by her brother, and then is raped (?) by a policeman, who becomes her husband. She then pops out three kids within a few hundred more pages. It's almost astounding what Oates does with this character.

Well, it doesn't last. As the book progresses, the action slows down. Toward the middle of the book, the plot spikes when Maureen, Loretta's daughter and a victimized female character, discovers the value of money, and, frustrated by her own family's lack of it, takes up prostitution. This is her way of trying to move up in the world. However, her stepfather sees her being picked up one day and beats her within an inch of her life. She spends awhile in bed, refusing to get up or respond to anyone. This is the last exciting part in the book.

Jules is the hero, or anti-hero, rather, of the book. Oates clearly focues on him as the main character, not by mentioning him more or going into more detail about him, but by elevating him. Through Loretta, she describes his maturity and bright personality as a child, and through Loretta, his responsibility as a breadwinner and loyalty to his sister. However, Jules presents the biggest disappointment of the entire book. Oates builds him up as a character with the potential to rise above her terrible image of Detroit's poverty...and then lets us down by letting him fail, again and again.

Jules almost loses his life because of love. By far the most bizarre sequences in the novel are the ones where he interacts with the love of his life, Nadine. They have an abnormal relationship, to say the least. Jules notices her through a business venture, and creeps into her house. He convinces her to come with him and drives her far away. However, she abandons him when he falls ill, a strange twist of events after both express their sudden, passionate love for each other. They meet again within a few years, but Nadine is married. Nadine makes plans to leave her husband, and even rents an apartment for she and Jules to share. However, after the two make love for several hours (without stopping), she shoots him and almost kills him, and then shoots herself. The reader isn't sure whether she survived, though at the end of the book, Jules says that he is going to marry Nadine. However, at this point, I am pretty sure that Jules is deranged, if not for believing her to be alive, then merely for the fact that he insists on pursuing a relationship with a psychopath like Nadine.

This is very contemporary literature. Maybe I just don't "get it." But my complaints are much more numerous than my compliments. If I wade through over five hundred pages of novel, I expect something redeeming. While I won't go so far as to say that there was nothing redeeming about "them," I can honestly say that there wasn't enough to make it worth it.

The theme of love bordering on violence is prevalent in "them." Oates often throws it in your face, in a way that is often quite disturbing. Jules and Nadine are an obvious example of this. They both passionately love each other, so much that not touching each other is simply not an option. So much that Jules will practically rape her in order to sleep with her. So much that Jules acts like an overprotective psychopath. So much that Nadine feels trapped by their love, lost in it. And so much that Nadine decides to kill them both?

And, of course, Maureen's brief stint with whoring is another example of love/violence. Oates repeats again and again that Maureen's customers constantly tell her that they are in love with her. As a result, Maureen doesn't understand love and both longs for it and fears it. She marries one of her professors late in the book, stealing him from his wife and three children. When Jules visits in the very last chapter, and asks her if she loves her husband, she only says, "I'm going to have a baby. I'm a different person," which is both cryptic and completely typical of Maureen. This suggests that she repels love, although in a letter she writes, she claims to want it desperately.

One more thing that I want to mention is the bizarre dialogue in Oates' novel. Very much unlike the sparse, realistic dialogue of Hemingway and Salinger, Oates' characters pontificate in flowery, emotional language. I gagged on the emotionally clogged speeches of Nadine, as well as Vera, a girl Jules meets near the end of the book. They all spout their feelings, in a seemingly uncontrollable manner. It is not only unrealistic: It takes away from Oates' otherwise lifelike portrayel of Detroit.

For the serious reader, "them" is a good read, if only to understand Detroit and maybe mull over these heavy topics for awhile. For everyone else, though, give "them" a pass.(less)

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Aug 27, 2012 Stephanie rated it 5 of 5 stars

I was in Detroit soon after the riots when I read this book. It was one of my all time favorites although I was depressed for months after reading it. Man's inhumanity to man (I think). I highly recommend it. The writing is superb! Wonderful!

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Sep 05, 2012 Paul Gleason rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Maybe it's my recent reading of Zombie, but I just can't get behind Oates the way I once did. In fact, my reading of them - the novel for which JCO won a National Book Award - brought to the surface all the bad feelings about JCO that I've probably been harboring in my cranium ever since I started reading her.

Using an energetic and extremely passionate prose style that recalls Emily Brontë, Mailer, Kerouac, and even Lawrence, JCO's novels read like exuberant explosions of pure story. But the pro...more Maybe it's my recent reading of Zombie, but I just can't get behind Oates the way I once did. In fact, my reading of them - the novel for which JCO won a National Book Award - brought to the surface all the bad feelings about JCO that I've probably been harboring in my cranium ever since I started reading her.

Using an energetic and extremely passionate prose style that recalls Emily Brontë, Mailer, Kerouac, and even Lawrence, JCO's novels read like exuberant explosions of pure story. But the problem - for this writer at least - is that I learn nothing about craft when reading her books.

The problem into which JCO always runs is her need to sustain the energy of her prose if she wants to keep her reader engaged. In other words, without developing a new structure (and she probably needs to do this every time she sets pen to paper, which is quite often for such a frighteningly prolific novelist), she has nothing to hang her hat on but pure story and plot. And, for me at least, story and plot simply aren't enough to sustain my interest in her books anymore - once in a while, I need innovation.

Take a minute and compare any JCO novel to Wuthering Heights or The Executioner's Song or On the Road (even in the original scroll version) or Lady Chatterley's Lover, and you'll see that these novels have structural components that, at the same time, are extremely innovative and don't sacrifice their emotional core. These structural components prevent these books from falling into a mundane whirlwind of sheer emotion and plot. The reader of these books senses an innovative mind at work - one that doesn't rest on its laurels.

I know that JCO knows just what she's doing, so I can't say that her books are bad or shouldn't be read. It's just that she's so CONTENT with repeating the same formula over and over again. She writes most of her books in the same, heated style - and she doesn't change. The Gravedigger's Daughter, which came out about five years ago, hearkens back stylistically to what JCO was doing almost forty years earlier in them.

This raises one of the eternal questions of art. Should artists change and innovate? Are innovators better? Mailer, Kerouac, and Lawrence never wrote the same book twice. Each book was a new thought adventure that demanded a new style.

But, you may retort, JCO is, unlike the three writers mentioned in the previous paragraph, at heart a realist and perhaps even a naturalist. Her books aren't SUPPOSED to change stylistically. They're SUPPOSED to apply a tried-and-true method to historical situations and present the ways in which characters are affected by them.

Okay. I get it. But compare JCO to Mailer and Lawrence. These two writers always created different forms to discuss the historical situations in which their characters found themselves. Do The Naked and the Dead, Armies of the Night, and The Executioner's Song have the same style? Do The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Different historical times require different aesthetic approaches.

I'm not arguing that Mailer and Lawrence know how to write books, and JCO doesn't. I'm just saying that she settles on stylistic repetition that makes reading more than two or three of her books completely unnecessary. I suppose that's a good thing, considering how many books she's written.(less)

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Dec 21, 2010 Stuart rated it 2 of 5 stars

It is bad to admit I can barely remember the details of this book? Sad, but true. I remember thinking it reasonably well written but hard to enjoy- and that later part because every character was sort of unlikable or unrelateable, and this because each and every one of them was mired in misery from page one to the final moments (the mother, I seem to recall, gets some kind of mild redemption). I know that this kind of heavy, gritty book really changed American literature when it first hit the sc...more

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Aug 03, 2012 Ann Duddy rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I thought it only fair that since I have read a gazillion books in my life time, it would make sense to finally get around to reading Joyce Carol Oates, who has written a gazillion books. So I thought I would start with "Them", which won the National Book Award in the early 70s. (Not to be confused with the movie about giant killer ants of the same name.) Plus, I found this at a local used book store for a dollar and I just couldn't pass up that cover!

Well, let's just say that a)the National Boo...more

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Jun 19, 2012 Pam rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

Before starting this book, I read a review that said by the time you got to the end you wouldn't care what happened to any of them. Too true!

This book was far less a story about Detroit and race relations than it was about the author. I couldn't figure out the "I don't know anything about anything" attitude of ALL the characters until I got to the epilogue. It became clear when the author herself said she wasn't sure if she meant for a character to be herself or not. Randomness followed by more...more

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Aug 02, 2009 Sunny Shore rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is strictly vintage Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century. Not one of my favorites, but nevertheless the cerebral Oates gets raw and real in this book about a poor, down and out family from the depression through the '60's in Detroit. Always an artist of characterization, JCO introduces us to Loretta, Jules and Maureen, three members of a family where survival is the only thing to look forward to every day of their lives. At times a little wor...more

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Sep 13, 2012 Nic rated it 2 of 5 stars

It was a relief to reach the end of this based-in-fact novel of Detroit poverty and violence. Them spans two generations of a family who longs for better things, but can't make a more peaceful, healthy, affluent life happen. Oates starts with Loretta as an optimistic teen stuck caring for her alcoholic father and older brother, working at a dry cleaners. She really breaks your heart by getting you to feel her young character's yearning for a better life, then showing how they get sucked into pro...more

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Apr 19, 2013 Jennifer rated it 1 of 5 stars

I could not digest this book at all. The story of her student that this book is based on, is poorly written. I agree that the actual story of this girl is a good one, it is her life story as she says. Unfortunately the way Joyce Carol Oates wrote FOR her was dry and had no feeling, because it is NOT her life she is writing about. I wish the book would have been written by the girl the story is based on, she would have been able to express her own story with passion and from her heart. I was not...more

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May 23, 2012 Silvia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Così comincia il libro "In una calda sera dell'agosto 1937, una ragazza innamorata si trovava in piedi davanti allo specchio.
Si chiamava Loretta. Era innamorata della propria immagine riflessa nello specchio, e da questo amore sognante e piacevole scaturiva un senso di eccitazione irrequieto e cieco..."
"Quelli" sono Loretta, Jules e Maureen. Il pregio di questa meravigliosa scrittrice è che ti porta dritto dentro le teste dei suoi personaggi, sempre così soli e disperati, e non c'è mai un bricio...more

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Jan 31, 2013 Freddie Owens rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Ms. Oates work is eminently readable - depicting episodes of violence, which seemed strange and heartless (at times thinly supported by the narrative that preceded them). There are also improbable liaisons, family histories founded on rape and abuse, even murder or attempted murder and tortured loves, all seemingly unredeemable and given momentum by an ignorance never fully examined by the author much less her characters. THEM won the National Book Award back in the early seventies. As depressin...more

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Jun 24, 2012 Peter rated it 3 of 5 stars

I love Joyce Carol Oates, and this novel was good, but not my fave. Fascinating story, and JCO's usual dreamlike quality is quite prevalent. Still, I had some trouble staying focused.

The story centers on Maureen and Julian, two siblings growing up in blue collar Detroit. Their tribulations take them to lower and lower depths, but they remain steadfast in pursuing the American Dream.

JCO says it's one of her best, and I definately recommend for completists, but I may not recommend as a beginning...more

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Sep 10, 2012 Chris Gager rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I just read JCO's little intro last night. I have to finish another book first so I'll probably start tomorrow. I wanted to read "What I Lived For" but haven't been able to find it at the local libraries so I'll read this relatively famous one. "We Were the Mulvaneys" was only so-so for me but I want to give the author another shot. My edition is a paperback with a murky B&W cover photo of a riot scene.
Day one... still barely into the book but I like the author's style. Abrupt... almost brut...more I just read JCO's little intro last night. I have to finish another book first so I'll probably start tomorrow. I wanted to read "What I Lived For" but haven't been able to find it at the local libraries so I'll read this relatively famous one. "We Were the Mulvaneys" was only so-so for me but I want to give the author another shot. My edition is a paperback with a murky B&W cover photo of a riot scene.
Day one... still barely into the book but I like the author's style. Abrupt... almost brutal.
Another day... making some progress here but my spare time has become precious. Job demands and car woes... I was thinking that I've read a number of books in the recent years about the troubles of white families in the land of opportunity(America): "The Corrections", "After This", and "We Were the Mulvaneys" are some of those that come to mind and now this book, which drops the observo-scope down lower on the old socioeconomic scale. The family in this book is intensely dysfunctional, nomadic and hopeless. Emotional and spiritual nourishment for the kids is not forthcoming. We are learning how two of the children cope and try to create their own more satisfying and protected inner lives, immune from the stresses of their wider(though still constricted) environment. Escape is dreamed of... Who are "them" anyway? The faceless flyover people of America I suppose. Dead-enders both urban and rural. Obviously JCO finds the subject fascinating and the fact that Maureen is based on a real person and her family makes it extra compelling. Not many left in Detroit I suppose. Maybe Eminem came from the same background as Maureen. She(or someone like her) could be his mother I suppose. "Middlesex" was also set in Detroit. A very different kind of story, though.
Day next... Another hundred pages into this grim saga. I can sort of relate to those who express misgivings about sticking with the "pain" family all the way. I'm semi-committed to sticking with it. JCO is not a great writer but she's pretty good and she means business. Notes:
- Loretta is another mother in the vein of Mama Mulvaney; hysterical, clueless and narcissistic but a survivor.
- seeing parallels with the "Roseanne" show. R. worked as a hair salon go-fer too. Pretty much the same hollering social class too.
- as in "Vanity Fair" money and/or the lack thereof is paramount. Having it offers a means of escape to freedom and control.
Wed. night... Life is ever strange. Shortly after reading the Jules-Nadine story I went to see "Moonrise Kingdom", a tale of confused young lovers on the lam... escaping. As for JCO's version I'm not convinced. Maureen's story seems genuine enough but the Jules-Nadine thing sounds like some dreamy, overheated 50's movie script; think James Dean and Natalie Wood. I was a teenager and did plenty of talking and listening. I never heard crap like that. And even in the further development section following they aren't convincing as somewhat older human beings either. Maureen's letter's were wonderful. Were they real? Notes:
- I'm reminded of a fine New Yorker story of 20 or so years ago(JCO?) about a young woman escaping(St. Louis) from a disintegrating family after the father's death.
- Jules=Leo Di Caprio=Frank in "Rev. Road" - a bullshitter
- many tales out there of young lovers on the run in America: "Thieves Like Us", "They Live By Night", "Bonnie and Clyde", "Badlands"...
- Jules and Bernard... what happened to the clever and "resourceful" Jules? A bunch of B.S.?
- The author's bad habit of going on and on, which crippled "... The Mulvaneys" crops up again.
- on page 306... "... they hadn't money"????? How about "they didn't have any money" or "they had no money"?
- Jules' southern sickness reminds of Joey's S. American woes in "Freedom".
Finished after the weekend. Well... Joyce has done it again; turned a 4* into a 3* by over-writing and overreaching. Same as with my other JCO read "We Were the Mulvaneys". This is a better book but not by much. I want to write a lot about what's wrong with this book but I find myself with a deficit of caring right now. 500 pages for Maureen to tell the creepy Jules to take a hike... I find myself at a loss to understand the fascination and even attraction of the author to Jules. Let's see... runaway, child-arsonist, mugger, burglar, abductor, adulterer, kidnapper, pimp, helpless(?) exploiter of women(can't seem to stop calling ALL of them "Honey"), rioter, looter and, yes, finally an apparently remorseless murderer. When JCO speaks of "her deep regard for Jules" it reminds me of Mailer's infatuation with Jack Henry Abbott. These writers like hypnotized babies in the face of clueless, destructive and criminal narcissism. I'm not saying that the fucked-up lives of people like Loretta, Nadine, Maureen, Brock, Betty(what happened to her?), Jules and Jim(GET IT?) are not fascinating from a more detached socio/psychological perspective but get off the "feeling sorry" for them. Get 'em off the streets first. I liked Denis Johnson's approach in describing the Houston brothers better. Gritty and unsentimental... Maureen's struggles seem to be mostly a result of environment and circumstance but Jules was weird from the git-go. No doubt the depressing family environment didn't help but he seemed close to going the Bundy route. A better, more interesting and accessible(to me) route for the author would have been contained by more objectivity. Notes:
- Jules reminds of Jack Boughton in "Home".
- Once again the author writes way too much delerious prose about someone in spiritual/emotional crisis(Jules). I had to start skipping so I could finish the book. Same with Marianne Mulvaney...
- Her writing in this book reminded me of "3 Lives" by Gertude Stein. This is not good a good thing but JCO did the dreamy repetitive prose thing better. I guess the idea is to give a realistic word picture of someone's inner life. All that looping repetition and return. The problem is that most of this inner life is non-verbal except for imagined conversations, and thus troubling and potentially excrutiating ("Melanctha") when replicated as prose.
3.25 stars...
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Jun 23, 2011 Stephanie Ricker rated it 1 of 5 stars

Someone, somewhere, sometime ago recommended Them by Joyce Carol Oates to me. I have no idea who, so I don't know at whom to be miffed right now. I know Oates has won various literary awards and is supposed to be really good, but...ugh. I'm maybe 150 pages in, and so far it's sordid in a terribly dull way. It's not shocking or anything, it's just very blandly ugly. 500 pages of that may be more than I care to suffer through, but I'll at least give it a bit longer to get its act together.

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Jun 21, 2008 Lola Wallace rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Lola by: Kate K.

Shelves: 1960s-and-70s

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, surprising, brutal and...more

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Feb 03, 2008 Ron Grunberg rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

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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Mar 31, 2010 Megan Blood rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: didn-t-finish

I made it about 200 pages into this sucker (it's a big book). Her writing is beautiful, which is why I was determined to keep reading. But then I was forced to put the book down for an entire (crazy) weekend, and by Monday I realized that I just didn't care. I had no emotional attachment to any of the characters (who are all incredibly dysfunctional). I just can't see what would possibly be in the next hundreds of pages except more pointless dysfunction and strangely stoic sexual encounters. Not...more

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Mar 08, 2013 Sabrina Harvey rated it 4 of 5 stars

A lot of people won't like this book because it's so seamy and bleak, but I loved it for some strange reason. It seemed to fall into 5 distinct sections for me - Loretta as a vacuous young woman and mother; Jules as a rambunctious boy full of promise; Maureen as a fearful, depressed...what????, Jules embroiled in a frenzied love affair, and then Jules as a...I won't spoil it. In each section, I marveled at the REALNESS of these characters, even as I wanted to kick their butts for their incompreh...more

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Feb 20, 2010 Faye rated it 5 of 5 stars

This s a 3rd of a quartet of novels written by Joyce Carol Oates in the 1960s and are based on issues of racism and poverty in Detroit, Michigan. I have been reading the Modern Library versions of the first 3 novels. The main theme and key question are does being poor necessitate becoming vicious and violent to survive? After reading the book I think an affirmative answer is the only one possible. Joyce Carol Oates lived in this region for many years, moving to Canada after the 1967 riots. The 1...more

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About Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. Pseudonyms ... Rosamond Smith and Laure ...more

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