Expensive People Read Online Free

woman writer as fit punishment for having gone beyond the ‘limits of her world’—upstate New York.” Nada is no suburban mom, but an artist, trying both to fit into the “normal world” of the American family and also to compete in the macho world of publishing. Like Virginia Woolf's essay on “Killing the Angel in the House,” Nada's fictional execution is Oates's nightmare solution to the burdens of femininity facing the serious woman artist.
THEM (1969)
    Some of the metafictional aspects of
Expensive People
carried over into Oates's next novel,
them.
Oates introduced her epic story about a white working-class family with an “Author's Note,” describing the book as “a work of history in fictional form,” based on the recollections of one of the characters, “Maureen Wendall,” and some readers took it literally, writing to ask how the Wendalls were doing. Oates herself appeared as a character in the novel, as the recipient of two letters from Maureen, who says she took a course on “Introduction to Literature” from “Miss Oates” at the University of Detroit in 1964, got an “F,” but has never forgotten the teacher's apparent sense of control, happiness, and faith in books like
Madame Bovary.
The letters allow Maureen to confront the novelist, and protest against her relative powerlessness and insignificance as a woman whose life is much drabber than those in books.
    Indeed,
them
cannot imagine any self-determination for its women characters. Its central story contrasts the experience of Maureen and her brother Jules, growing up in inner-city Detroit. She is the more bookish and intellectual sibling, but like Clara in
A Garden of Earthly Delights,
Maureen is doomed by her femaleness; she is frantic to escape, but has no way to earn money or get away except prostitution. When her stepfather finds out that she has been getting paid for sex, he beats her so badly that she becomes virtually comatose for two years. And this is a metaphor for all women's lives; even a rich woman, as one character says, “lives in a dream, waiting for a man. There is no way out of this, insulting as it is, no woman can escape it.”
    In contrast, Jules, partly modeled onjulien Sorel of Stendhal's
The Red and the Black,
understands that even at his weakest he has more power than a woman. “A woman in a car only appears to be in control!” he thinks as a teenager. “Inside, her machinery is as wobbly and nervous as the machinery of her car.” One of Jules's first jobs is playing messenger boy for a petty gangster who gives him a gun and sends him out to buy a Cadillac. Yet Jules has grandiose dreams of greatness; he feels fated to become an important man, and wants to model himself on the Indian mystic and theorist of nonviolence Vinoba Bhave, about whom he reads in
Time
magazine. He internalizes Bhave's words: “Firemerely burns … Fire burns and does its duty. It is for others to do theirs.”
    But Jules misunderstands this message as an endorsement of violence and anarchy and carries it with him until he sees it embodied in the Detroit riots, with which
them
ends. Oates's version of the riots is apocalyptic, with Mort, the professor who is the leader of the student radicals, on a death and ego trip, the students arguing about whether Lyndon Johnson or Martin Luther King would be more suitable targets for assassination, the black families looting, and the police as brutal and out of control as the rest. Jules joins the radical group and speaks on television for its “beliefs”: “It is only necessary to understand that fire burns and does its duty, perpetually, and the fires will never be put out.… Violence can't be singled out from an ordinary day! … Everyone must live through it again and again, there's no end to it.” In our last sight of him, Jules is heading to California in an air-conditioned car, to use political organizing as a route to making big money in real estate. Somehow he has become the