 First Edition | |
| Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | novel |
| Publisher | Vanguard Press |
Publication date | 1968 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 308 |
| ISBN | 978-0814901700 |
Expensive People is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates first published in 1968 by Vanguard Press. A Fawcett Publications paperback edition was issued in 1974. [1] [2]
The novel is the second in a trilogy of works including A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and them (1969). [3] [4]
 | This section needs a plot summary.(February 2025) |
Expensive People is told by an unreliable first-person narrator, the eighteen-year-old Richard Everett, who opens his “memoir” with the entry: “I was a child murderer.” [5] [6] [7]
New York Times literary critic John Knowles congratulates Joyce Carol Oates for undertaking a project fraught with “technical problems” that challenge “her literary imagination and her talent,” but with some success. The use of a first-person confessional narrative Mr. Knowles regards as a “powerful and tricky concoction.” The novel’s narrator, the 18-year-old and self-confessed murderer, Richard Everett, “digresses to give us his views on art, writing, imagery, puns, you, me, and so on.” The reviewer confesses, self-mockingly, that the precocious protagonist wrote his review. [8]
In tone and style, Expensive People is a “striking departure” from Oates’s fiction to that date. Abandoning the third-person omniscient examination the focal character, the novel is postmodernist, presented as a memoir by an unreliable narrator. [9] [10]
Literary critic Greg Johnson identifies the novel as a “contemporary Gothic satire” in the style of Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita (1955), and an “exploration of American culture.” [11] Johnson remarks on the comic elements of the novel:
On a purely literary plane, the novel parodies the memoir, literary criticism, and especially the traditions of the realistic novel and the “unreliable narrator” itself - even as it partakes of all these. [12] Johnson reminds readers that the experimental aspects of the novel include autobiographical references to Oates’s physical appearance and family history. [13]
Terming the novel a “naturalist allegory” and a “tour-de-force,” biographer Joanne V. Creighton locates its thematic center:
Rather than a piece of naturalistic realism like her other novels, Expensive People is a masterful satire of both literary and suburban conventions. At the core of the novel is Oates’s questioning - at once playful and probing - of the elusive nature of both life and art. [14]
Oates goes so far with self-parody as to portray her protagonist consulting and critiquing one of her essays, “Building Tension in the Short Story” ( The Writer , June 1966). [15]