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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A flawed but engaging early work by the prolific Oates,
By A Customer
This review is from: Expensive People (Paperback)
Joyce Carol Oates must be one of the most prolific contemporary novelists of our time. Her taste for torrid themes, in particular the brutal and bizarre, are well known. "Expensive People", one of her early works, starts off with a bang. A more direct opening you'll not find. The scene is set. You're instantly captivated and as she reels you in, you succumb and immediately find yourself in Richard Everett's head as he unveils his life story to you...bit by bit. You know you're dealing with dysfunctionality as soon as you meet his parents. There's a seething madness underneath just waiting to get out. If the medium were film, you'll see them cast in grainy black and white. But it isn't. Sad to say, the book loses momentum midway and it becomes tedious. You keep waiting for something to happen and when it does, it's anticlimactic. In the words of Richard, life isn't fiction. Nor is it half as dramatic. Oates is a colourful and engaging writer. She's got craft but has a tendency to indulge herself and when she does, she loses focus. "Expensive People" isn't a conventional thriller. It's a social critique of American society at the turn of the 60s decade and about the falseness of respectable society on the brink of a social revolution that will forever shatter time tested norms. While flawed and not entirely satisfying, it's an impressive early work and Oates got much better by the time she wrote Black Water.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A highly enjoyable book,
By A Customer
This review is from: Expensive People (Paperback)
JCO takes us deep into the mind of a child killer -- that is a killer who just happens to be a chid. It's a disturbing affair, with the style random and jumbled to give a bit of consistency to this troubled mind.As an early adult recovering from a near similiar fate as the central character, Richard Elwood, I find it an accurate portrait of the descent into childhood madnesses. It is also a realistic picture of middle America in the 1960s. JCO writing is superb and she really pulls you into the minds of her characters through Elwood's slow narrative. A great book
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
surrealism of suburbia,
By J Goldman (Crested Butte, CO) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Expensive People (Paperback)
Joyce Carol Oates writes a Nostradamus-like prediction in "Expensive People". She delves deeply and sympathetically into the mind of a maddened child, and what events and conditions have played upon this child to reduce him to his psychotic state. Her description of suburbia are chillingly real, in the surrealism that they potray about our middle-America life and the saftey net of support that is purported. In the wake of the events at Columbine high school in Littleton, CO, "Expensive People" is a must read for all of our society to better understand ourselves, and our disenchanted teenagers.
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