Them by Joyce Carol Oates

Publisher: Modern Library
First Published: 1969

Genre: modern classic

“She drifted down to the library whenever she was free. Growing up and moving away from home was somehow linked in her mind with the library - the library at night, its silence and openness. Anything might happen. Nothing happened but anything might.”

And in this book it does sometimes feel like anything might happen. Reading this opened up a new section of America’s past for me, somewhere very different to the gilt of Hollywood or the wholesome images of a clean-cut working class that I have found in other novels. The story is told in turns from the viewpoint of Loretta Wendall and two of her children, Maureen and Jules, and is set mainly in Detroit covering the period between 1937 and 1966. Joyce Carol Oates writes in a disarmingly simple way, using minimal descriptive passages. This seemed to me to give the novel an increased sense of realism, as if this is how the characters would have described the events themselves. In her afterword (written in 1999), the author relates how she is still approached by readers enquiring after the Wendall family or asking her to forward on mail to them; she even received a letter from a “happily married” woman who was convinced she had fallen in love with the questionable hero Jules. The book, however, is fictional (despite the appearance of a teacher named Miss Oates) but the history is real and the viciousness with which all of the characters are searching for something better than what they have, through love, or money, or drink, is something which seems just as relevant in today’s consumption-obsessed society.

The sudden violent incidents which form interim conclusions to the slow-boiling tales, and often mark a change in key character, kept surprising me - to the point where I had to keep doing the reading equivalent of a double-take and retracing my footsteps to check whether I should have seen this coming. I felt that this reflected what often happens when serious violence enters people's lives - the sudden escalation of a small incident, the flash of someone’s temper and then irreparable damage and no way of going back. It’s this hard edge to the already tough but everyday story of poverty that kept my interest. Through her insight and the detail she gives of her characters’ thoughts and actions, Joyce Carol Oates catches you up in the relatively small lives of the three central characters - at times my frustration with Jules as he made yet another bad decision was almost painful!

I haven’t read any other books by Joyce Carol Oates, but from looking at some of her other works I get the impression that the Wonderland Quartet (A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, them and Wonderland) may be quite different in style to some of her other books. I’ll let you know at some point as I’m sure I will be reading more of her work.

Links:
Joyce Carol Oates’ website
The book on amazon

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Fidelity by Susan Glaspell
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides