We Were the Mulvaneys

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. Dopo che me ne sono andato quel giorno, quella domenica di Pasqua, ricordi? Mi sono svuotato. Il veleno che avevo nel sangue è colato fuori. Come fossi stato malato, infetto, e non me ne fossi accorto finché il veleno è scomparso. Però non rimpiango nulla. Penso che la vendetta debba essere bella. I greci lo sapevano. Sangue chiama sangue. Credo che l’istinto della “giustizia” sia innato, presente nei nostri geni. Il bisogno di ristabilire l’equilibrio.»

This is also a novel that can be read on many levels. Certainly it is the story of the deterioration of an American family, but it is also the story of how difficult it is to break the bonds of love once forged. It is also a story of the fragility of self-esteem solely based on how others view us, which, of course, can turn on a dime, with underscoring threads of the fundamental coldness of nature itself and the inevitibility of death. These themes are interwoven with the philosophies of Christianity, Darwinism, and the age of reason that in Oates' skilled hands seem not to compete with each other so much as to cooperate, and perhaps even complement. Profoundly cathartic, this extraordinary novel unfolds as if Oates, in plumbing the darkness of the human spirit, has come upon a source of light at its core. Moving away from the dark tone of her more recent masterpieces, Joyce Carol Oates turns the tale of a family struggling to cope with its fall from grace into a deeply moving and unforgettable account of the vigor of hope and the power of love to prevail over suffering. Nadie podía mencionar lo que había ocurrido, ni deseaba mencionarlo: violación era una palabra que no se mencionaba en High Point Farm. ¿Cuáles eran las palabras que se pronunciaban? Recuerdo abusos, agresión, aprovecharse de..., daño. Esas eran las palabras que yo oía, por casualidad o no, aunque no se expresaban abiertamente". Nuestras vidas quedan definidas por los antojos, caprichos, crueldades de otros. Esa telaraña genética, los lazos de sangre. Era la más antigua maldición, más antigua que Dios. ‘¿Me aman?, ¿me quieren? ¿Quién me querrá, si no lo hacen mis padres?’. I read that last run-on sentence four times before comprehending it. And in the same paragraph (!) we get:

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The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year. Ms. Oates, who is childless, dedicates her novel to "my" Mulvaneys. But you don't need to have a large family to appreciate this emotionally charged story. For Joyce Carol Oates is a truly gifted storyteller who artfully handles multi-charactered and multi-layered pieces of fiction. An extraordinary woman of letters, Ms. Oates has also authored twenty-one volumes of short stories and more than a dozen works of non-fiction. This, combined with her twenty-five previous novels, adds up to more than fifty books by a fifty-seven-year-old woman. One night, when he arrives home late and drunk, Michael is rough with Corinne, and Judd intervenes against his father. The next day, Judd moves out and finds his own apartment.

Puoi avere un solo figlio miracoloso. Se sei fortunato. Però molta gente non lo è. (Quindi non dovete gongolare, è ovvio)A veces, las familias son así. Una cosa va mal y nadie sabe como arreglarla y pasan los años y...nadie sabe como arreglarlo".

Writing makes Oates melancholy, especially towards the end of a book, when the momentum propels her through 10-hour days. She needs to surround herself with people to relax. So it was that, in spite of disliking most television and finding popular culture "debased", Oates took to Oprah's Book Club in a way some of her younger, more modish literary peers did not. In Oprah's world, readers don't read; they stay up all night sobbing their way through a book and then write to its author in the morning. "I found that very wonderful and very surprising," says Oates, blinking her great marble eyes. "Since I'm a literary person, I look upon books as texts that have been imagined and written. But the general reading public looks upon books as documents of reality, and so the people on Oprah would say, for instance, 'I have a mother just like that.' Or, 'My father was just like that.' Or, 'This happened to me.' They don't seem to perceive - nor do they wish to perceive - that this is a novel. I think if they had, for instance, a class on Shakespeare's Hamlet, they would say, 'Gertrude is just like my mother; Hamlet's like my brother; Ophelia, that's my story.' And they would get a lot of emotion out of that." She falters. There is nothing wrong with reading as therapy, but there is something perhaps painful to an author in seeing readers gobble up their books as an excuse to "basically talk about themselves". Oates's eyelashes lower. "Of course, one doesn't want to dampen that enthusiasm." Readers have reacted in sharply contrasting ways to the dilemma of the heart of the novel: If a loving, family-oriented woman must choose between her husband and one of her children, whom does she choose? Corinne Mulvaney is a deeply, unself-consciously religious woman who acts out of love and duty, but also with an unquestioned sense of God's intentions. She doesn't think of herself her own wishes but those of others; until the end of the novel, when she befriends an energetic, irrepressible woman named Sable, Corinne doesn't think of herself as an individual at all. She's Corinne Mulvaney, known to everyone as Michael Mulvaney's wife. Her behavior will seem baffling, even unconscionable, to those who don't share her faith. I don't believe that, in her place, I would have acted as she did, but I don't judge her harshly. Perhaps I even envy her faith. I've read Foxfire and want to reread it now, but I remember it's tone and style being extremely different from We Were the Mulvaneys. I haven't read any of Oates other works, though. Do they all vary from each other? Do they live up to the greatness of We Were the Mulvaneys? Should I try out her other works, or am I just destined to be disappointed after this book? I would love to hear your opinions on Oates other works as well as what you thought of We Were the Mulvaneys. Did y'all enjoy it as much as I did and have it affect you like it did me? Please share.Corinne, who after Michael dies eventually gets together with Sable and is happy once again and pulls off the reunion and everyone is there except Michael and that seems to be okay. And we sigh with relief because we so wanted Corrine to be happy, maybe, well at least some of us, more than any other of these six characters because except for Marianne of course it has been Corinne who has suffered the most in this story, surviving in all probability only because of her innate optimism and realism, and because of (or maybe in spite of) the religious ideas that consumed and okay also supported her through all her troubles. Judd imagines but does not invent. He’s the intellectual and moral center of the novel, as it is presented in terms of language. It’s fitting that he’s a newspaper editor and writer. Many people in families feel themselves in repositories of the family narrative —as Judd says, he is assembling a kind of family album, not writing a “confession.” Una de las virtudes del estilo de Joyce Carol Oates en mi opinión es que deja muchos detalles del argumento, y de algunas situaciones a la imaginación del lector. Te presenta los hechos, te da los datos, pero se vuelve ambigua a la hora de explicarlo todo taxativamente, de esta manera, consigue que el lector se comprometa con los personajes y que desarrolle en su imaginación lo que ella te ha dejado intuir. Puedes adorar u odiar a ciertos personajes, sus decisiones, pero realmente consigue que lector participe activa y emocionalmente en el desarrollo de la historia. Al final esta novela no es más que la narración por parte de Joyce Carol de la historia de una familia, la construye y la desconstruye paso a paso para que la conozcamos, sin juzgarlos, pero a través de su infelicidad y de muchos de sus momentos emocionalmente muy fuertes, consigue transmitirnos lo dificil que es sobrevivir a los palos de la vida. The novel is so psychologically intricate – Oates documents all the little things, the minute failures in communication that build up until everything reaches the point of no return. I particularly enjoyed the description of how the family communicates through their pets in a way of avoiding having difficult conversations. The daughter’s only act of rebellion noted was this one time when she broke from this established form of communication and snapped at her mother. It was such a small thing, but it left ripples. As a person with an easy access to her store of anger and rage, I found the mother’s and daughter’s inability to get angry perplexing and frustrating, but possibly, understandable in its context.