Customer Reviews

Expensive People B (Virago Modern Classics)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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

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.

JCO, one of this country's most prolific writers, has written a book that takes what we read in the newspapers and see on the news, into the depths of the mind of how a possible child killer may think, and why he/she would act out the violent aggression that seems to plague so many of our young people today. The brutality of pretension and lies that make people go on a downward spiral to their doom is very well explained in this novel. Upon reading it, we, the readers, come to realize that we are either the fake ones or the desperate ones. Is there a possibility to overcome either side? If not, can we overcome the circumstances of our actions? Maybe. Maybe not.

I am reading a lot of Joyce Carol Oates books, as I love her style, and the way she takes you into her stories. At present I am reading her set of four books written in the 60s as part of the Wonderland Quartet, her first book A Garden of Earthly Delights is magnificent and superb story. Expensive People is a trying read. The highlights of this book are the way Oates describes people with money, and how little they give back to society...a commentary which still fits the high income level suburbs in Northern California as well, the plasticity of the individuals living in these areas, with their big houses, small yards, little interest but in jogging, going to teas, country clubs, etc...She is talking not about people with old monies, but the nouveau riche, and she does this very well. Oates uses a young overweight 18 year old as her primary narrator and character, he is the neglected son...is fixated with his mother, and his oedipal alliance creates lots of trauma for him and in the end causes tragedy and loss...In a sense the book has great images, it is written exceptionally well...might be that I did not read it fast enough, it surely was not a page turner for me, like other of her novels...I would recommemd it with reservation... it is an interesting book.

I've always enjoyed Joyce Carol Oates' writing, and I thought I'd give one of her earlier works a try. I found Expensive People to be somewhat disturbing and random, but since it was written in an autobiographical format, this style is in keeping with her main character. Even though you know how the book ends before you're finished, Oates does a wonderful job making the end somewhat unexpected. If you're a fan of descriptive narrative and what I like to call "slow suspense", you'll enjoy this one...

I've never been one to follow the pack and I've never liked being railroaded into reading specific authors or works. This is the reason it took such a long while before I read my first work by Joyce Carol Oates. An English professor spent an entire semester trying to convince me that I should read Oates work, so I resisted to the point that Expensive People was gifted to me and then sat on my bookshelf collecting dust for a year before I finally cracked the spine. From page one I was hooked. Although this is not the best piece I've ever read by JCO, it WAS the biggest surprise to me, hence the five star rating. Had I opened this book expecting to be thrilled by the story and the quality of Ms. Oates' writing, my rating would be a bit lower. However, this piece forced me to seek out other works by a woman who quickly became one of my favorite authors. Although I'll admit I was wrong to avoid reading her work, I'll refrain from admitting that my college professor was right...I still believe that you can't force anyone to love what you love just because you love it.

That said, read this book, don't read this book...It makes no difference to me. ;o)

I adore JCO enough to read a book like this that wanders about and somewhere just past the middle is it's own book.

It's own story is right there in the middle, it lasts about 3 pages and it might have been the book.

This is an uncomfortable book for any parent to read because we see our own flaws and indulgences, the ridiculousness of schooling and adulthood and the distance we create.

But it's beauty makes it less shocking.

A wonderful and engrossing read.

This was my first book of JCO's, and I'm tempted to read another. I liked her writing style although it is different and more disjointed that nice, neat and literary writing. You are taken into the head of a demented young man who not only thinks but writes strangely, and that's hard to wrap around, but interesting in that you can really identify, which can terrify you once you figure out the history of him.

A few reviews here say the book is predictable, although I was almost certain of the ending once I got to it, I wasn't sure it would end the way it did. I won't give anything away (I learned long ago not to read the reviews on amazon.com before I read the book, as people are wont to give away endings) but I will say this book was captivating and worth a read. Not perfect by any means, but it certainly kept my interest up and wasn't the same old story you usually read.

Joyce Carol Oates writes so much that a reader of my generation can hardly catch up with what she's written in the past, much less with what she continues to produce, unless they were to choose to read her work almost exclusively. I walked into a bookstore the other day, and sure enough, she has yet another new book out! Having read Them, I decided I was going to read all of The Wonderland Books, and living in a suburban area, I thought that this would be an interesting one to take on next. Oates tells a story that to me seemed ahead of its time. In our generation, we look back on Columbine as having occurred 10 years ago, only to realize that Pearl Jam wrote Jeremy a whole 10 years before that. A student shot up a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, where I got my doctorate, just a couple years ago. While Expensive People doesn't deal with school violence, it certainly begins to chip away at the psychology of troubled youth that all too often come from affluence--not poverty. And she does it 20 years before Jeremy. This book is well worth the reader's time.