Expensive People (1968)

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.

The novel is the second in Oates's Wonderland Quartet including A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), them (1969), and Wonderland.

Plot

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."

Reception

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.

Retrospective appraisal

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.

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." 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.

Johnson reminds readers that the experimental aspects of the novel include autobiographical references to Oates's physical appearance and family history.

Theme

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.

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).