Katy read and liked Tom's review of them:

"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 ...more 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 to fashion lives for themselves, against the odds, in a rapidly changing America.

them is not a 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.

And oh the things that happen. In the first 60 pages Loretta loses her virginity, wakes up to find her boyfriend shot by her brother, and marries a policeman who helps cover up the crime. There are plane crashes, fires, prostitution, rapes, throat-slittings, mental breakdowns, shootings, and, in a bravura set-piece finale, the ’67 Detroit race riots. It's a catalogue of modern Gothic horrors that grows increasingly bizarre as the story progresses.

Not all of it works. A sequence where Jules drives to Texas with Nadine, an upper-middle-class teenager from the suburb of Grosse Pointe, bogs down in the psychodynamics of their twisted relationship. The portrait of ’60s campus revolutionaries feels like social parody long past its expiry date. But Oates taps into so many highly charged currents—the violence of American life, the powerlessness of women in society, the inevitable disillusionments of growing up—that the reader can never quite write them off as just a crackpot soap opera. The book is disturbing, and it's unforgettable.(less) "