Customer Reviews

Them

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Them" has an intriguing and even risky premise: Joyce Carol Oates, who was teaching literature at the University of Detroit in the 1960s, receives some rambling, emotionally revelatory letters from a former student and fashions a novel out of this poor girl's life story. The girl was not a good student--Oates had flunked her, and it's easy to see why if her epistolary manner indicates the quality of her literary essays. But the passion and the pain in her letters cry out for a story to be told, one that is probably more interesting than any that could have been furnished by a better, happier pupil.

The girl is given the pseudonym of Maureen Wendall, and "Them" is the saga of her dysfunctional lower-class family from 1937 to about 1966. A laundry list of domestic turmoil--rape, murder, attempted murder, assault, accidental death--devastates the Wendalls as they migrate throughout the poor neighborhoods of Detroit, chasing solvency and dignity in vain. Her older brother Jules, a restless, rebellious spirit, can't stay away from bad influences or out of trouble, and her younger sister Betty is a mischievous tomboy whose delinquency seems to arise from familial neglect--they only take notice of her when she's doing something wrong, which of course is most of the time.

Maureen herself is bright enough and behaves well; she likes to read and makes the public library her sanctuary, where in the permanence of the words of Jane Austen novels she finds a comforting reality lacking in the instability of her home life. Her innocence is destined to falter, however; as a teenager, she begins meeting an older man and accepts money for having sex with him. When her ogreish stepfather suspects her of misdeeds, he beats her severely, incapacitating her to a bedridden, emotionally withdrawn state for about a year.

Jules, in the meantime, has quit school and begun living the life of a job-hopping, potentially dangerous drifter, part Frank Chambers, part Studs Lonigan, and (to be kind) a little part Tom Joad. He is hired as a chauffeur by a blundering rich (or once-rich) man named Bernard and through him meets his pretty niece, Nadine, a girl residing in an affluent suburb representing a world he has never before been able to attain. She runs away with him, and what happens to them on their cross-country journey and then afterward is too sad to be comical and yet too absurd to be tragic in the classical sense; too gross for the conventions of fiction, it could be expected to happen only in real life.

Oates culminates this novel filled with various kinds of violence in a race riot, against the backdrop of which the ideological diatribes uttered by several characters newly introduced to the story, advocating large-scale social changes for the nation, seem oddly removed from the more private concerns of the Wendall family. But, after all, the Wendalls' privacy is impacted and influenced by the public force of human presence, the people we don't necessarily know: "them." Much of the novel is uncomfortable to read, not so much with regard to the physical violence as when the characters use abusive language to hurt each other, but it resonates with a power and realism rarely seen in fiction.

This is one of Ms. Oates' earlier works set in Detroit.
It is a book of excellence as one generation is rolled into the other. A very true to life book where as the characters advance in reaching their destiny however small, they are always setbacks and stumbling blocks, not allowing them to see the light at the end of the tunnel, reminding us of the pathways we've walked before and are forever walking in. This was a very emotional book for me with great depth to the story line.

It is a long book and should be read with patience in order to get the gist of the Detroit the author penetrates in that century with it's poverty, racial and violent concerns. You won't forget Maureen Wendall who some will empathise with you see her desires and the things she yearns for with all her heart and soul.......and you won't forget her brother Jules either...intelligent and so very intricate you wonder what he is about to do next with that brain that never stops ticking. I cannot help saying what a brilliant writer I have found in Ms. Oates, and I encourage those who love her as much as I do to try THEM. I recommend it to all her favourite readers who haven't read this one as yet.
Reviewed by Heather Marshall Negahdar (SUGAR-CANE 02/03/02)

This book was somewhat of a struggle for me, though I am a giant Joyce Carol Oates fan. I thought it wasn't possible, but "Them" is more of a brooding, dark, and realistic novel than Oates has pulled off anywhere else in her career. Here is a lot of characters that are in constant danger of falling to pieces, of escaping one another, of realizing their limits as individuals and as a family unit. If you are not a reader who can take a kick in the stomach, don't read this book. However, if you are willing to realize there is a hard edge to life which goes unrecognized each day, pick this book up as soon as you can - Oates creates a world fatalism and human conditions that are at once terrifying, yet beautiful: it is hard to look away. I was held breathless and scared until the last word dropped like a boulder.

Them is a great book. Don't get my wrong. I enjoyed it very much and was fascinated by even the characters that didn't arouse much sympathy. But it also took me by surprise. As a fan of Joyce Carol Oates, this book was not what I expected. It's very down-to-earth without many of the gothic elements that can be found in her other novels, short stories, and plays. But that doesn't mean it isn't very dark in places as well. The story starts out in the early part of this century with Loretta - a teenage girl living in the inner city with her carousing brother and alcoholic, widower father. She is concerned mostly with having fun and meeting boys until her brother committs a murder that will change her life and the lives of her future family dramatically. The bulk of the story is centered around Loretta's son, Jules, who struggles with his family and the harsh environment of the city. The pace got a little slow in the middle, but it was appropriate for the lives of the characters. Real life doens't happen at a whirlwind pace for many, and one of the striking things about Them is how Oates captures the mundane nature of daily living even as life-changing events occur around the characters. So if you want to read Joyce Carol Oates save this book for another day and pick up Zombie or Foxfire instead. But come back to it

Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist of the first order. Her novel of postwar Detroit (really of postwar America), Them, is her best. Nothing she has written, before or since (even including her newest, the fictionalized biography of Marilyn Monroe) brings the reader the emotional power, or the superb prose of Oates' immortal classic. Readers who read Them when it was first published years ago deserve to study the new Modern Library edition. Readers unfamiliar with the best of Oates should run, not walk, to their bookstores or their personal computers and order this classic. It is as simple as that. Them is a masterpiece.

In this novel the characters seemed to be desperately trying to escape from each other, but unable to escape the past they share together. Joyce Carol Oates descriptions of the characters lives are vivid and oftentimes disgusting. The characters rarely seem to be able to make the right choices and are often victims of circumstance. Still, I was constantly intrigued during the novel. This novel is an excellent view of the sixties. Another wonderful novel by Oates is "Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart," whih is set in approximately the same time period. "Because it is Bitter..." adds the aspect of race relations and has a more solid ending than "Them."

To read this book is a pure pleasure. The writing is amazing, descriptive but not so much that your imagination is constricted. The characters are so complex and well developed, it makes reading along with them realistic and enjoyable. However, this is one of those "good" books with a depressing plot. That's how I would describe it, depressing. Over the course of the book things just keep getting worse, and at the very end - well, I won't give anything away. If you're the type of person who likes to watch movies like "Schindler's List", extremely well done but emotionally taxing, then you'll love this book.
One thing I was amazed at, however, was how Oates talked about things I have never before read in a book for school. She doesn't use any euphimisms, that's for sure. I suggest you read it, overall the writing and powerful emotions conveyed to the reader are far more amazing than anything else I have ever read.

Jules, Loretta, and Maureen Wendall are three of the most tormented and tormenting characters from modern American literature. These people, even Loretta but especially Maureen, have the capacity to advance themselves beyond their lower-class roots, yet each allows himself or herself to be doomed not just by the turmoil of events outside their lives, but by the limitations of their own personalities.

When Oates composed this aggressively frustrating novel some forty years ago, the material about which she wrote--whites living in poverty relocating from a rural setting to the Mecca of Detroit--was revolutionary and ground-breaking. The murders, sexual assaults, cruelty, kidnapping, government corruption, even the undermining of the American Dream, was all presented without dramatic enhancement or judgment, it was simply spoken of as any other event would be. This lack of commentary on the part of the author makes all that comes to pass within "them" so much more startling. Unlike many of her later forays into fantasy, this novel aches within the confines of the realism with which she wrote it.

Beginning with a cold blooded slaying in a bed and ending thirty years later in the ashes of the Detroit riots, "them" reconstructs much of the unpleasant side of mid-century American lower class life. Time and again we see glimmers of hope for Jules and Maureen, and (starting with the move to Detroit itself) for Loretta, and in every case---but one---we watch as the characters themselves let the chances go unused, or worse, warp them past recognition.

The novel "them" is powerful and disconcertingly real. The fact its author tells us about such terrible things in literary prose makes it seem all the more offensive to our sense of complacency.

The chapter near the end in which Maureen Wendall writes a letter to her teacher, Joyce Carol Oates, might confuse many, but this, too, is a literary construct, and represents an unusual Oatesean technique, a kind of letting the story rupture and protrude outward into what we think of as "our" world.

It's been a dozen years since I first read this novel and to this day I think it stands out more than any other Oates work as her most alluring trip into the superconsciousness of the twentieth-century American nation.

Probably my favorite of Oates books, and I am a HUGE fan. Starts off kinda slow, but I found myself staying up until all hours of the night because I didn't want to stop reading it. Clearly, Oates writes like no other. Her portrayal of the characters are all too real, with a disturbing edge to them. But that's what makes them fascinating. I was captivated by Jules. Reading her books make me wonder about her sometimes. She can be so wonderfully, deliciously.....disturbed.

This book describes the state of American turmoil during the 1960's with vivid imagery. Being in my mid-twenties and not alive to experience the 1960's, I feel this book provides an important account of these times. I truly felt the eerie adrenaline-induced excitement of this tumultous period. Jules' character chilled me to the bone; his evil sexuality reminiscent of the character of Arnold Friend in 'Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?" This is a beautifully written book, one of JCO's finest works to date.