Overview

Expensive, affluent, yes - but morally bankrupt - this is the suburbanite society from which Joyce Carol Oates carves out an electrifying novel of Gothic suspense. EXPENSIVE PEOPLE is the journal of Richard Elwood, an eighteen-year-old looking back with disaffection at his childhood in a succession of wealthy suburbs. He buys a rifle by mail-order ('German Sniper Rifle used by Mad Fanatic SS Men - Limited Number!') and roams the neighbourhood at night with it...The suspense is electrifying, the writing lethal. The first sentence is guaranteed to rivet your eyes to the page: 'I was a child murderer,' begins Richard. Now read on.

Full Product Details

9781860494840

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Terrifying ... searing ... important' KIRKUS REVIEWS 'Cuts to the bone in its chilling effectiveness' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 'You cannot put this book away after you have opened I t... hypnotic, fascinating and electrifying' DETROIT NEWS

With last year's A Garden of Earthly Delights, Miss Oates established herself as a writer of stature, and this terrifying novel, while falling back on some too easy shock values, is exemplary in commitment and technique. Again as in The Shuddering Fall (1966) and some of her short stories, she searches for the core of power and violence beneath appearances. Richard Everett, a 250 pound recluse, types out his childhood disintegration which begins with I was a child-murderer and continues with onion-skinning commentary. In the cool-lawn paradise of super-suburbia, his parents gesticulate in a sterile fashion - his noisy, blustering, pathetic, attractive father and his mother, the beautiful, darkly glittering Nada, a writer of mysterious origins. Thin, stunted, the child Richard is still open to the possibility of sustenance - strives to please Nada in her pursuit of status culture. Slowly he understands, in his deprivation, that Nada whom he loved hopelessly was a liar and a cheat, and that his real father remains hidden or confused. So Richard kills his mother (or did he?) and his father remarries and finally becomes the real father with Godlike punishing backslaps - really pounding you to death. This is not primarily an indictment of suburbia, but a savage exposure of self-orbiting deceptions. . . . Searing, unpleasant, important. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938. She has written many novels and numerous collections of stories, poetry and plays. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available