Expensive People is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates first published in 1968 by Vanguard Press. A Fawcett Publications paperback edition was issued in 1974.Johnson, 1994 pp. 218-222: Selected Bibliography, Primary WorksCreighton, 1979 pp. 161-169: Selected Bibliography
The novel is the second in Oates's Wonderland Quartet including A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), them (1969), and Wonderland.Johnson, 1987 p. 15: Lowercase for "them" is correct.
Plot
Expensive People is told by an unreliable first-person narrator, the eighteen-year-old Richard Everett, who opens his "memoir" with the entry: "I was a child murderer."Creighton, 1979 p. 55, p. 56: "...highly subjective first-person narrator..."Creighton, 1979 p. 55-63: Extended plot synopsis.Johnson, 1987 p. 52-54: Plot sketch
Reception New York Times literary critic John Knowles congratulates Joyce Carol Oates for undertaking a project fraught with "technical problems" that challenge "her literary imagination and her talent," but with some success. The use of a first-person confessional narrative Mr. Knowles regards as a "powerful and tricky concoction." The novel's narrator, the 18-year-old and self-confessed murderer, Richard Everett, "digresses to give us his views on art, writing, imagery, puns, you, me, and so on." The reviewer confesses, self-mockingly, that the precocious protagonist wrote his review.Knowles, 1997
Retrospective appraisal In tone and style, Expensive People is a "striking departure" from Oates's fiction to that date. Abandoning the third-person omniscient examination the focal character, the novel is postmodernist, presented as a memoir by an unreliable narrator.Johnson, 1987 p. 49Creighton, 1979 p. 56: Richard "has all the bias of a highly subjective first-person narrator.."
Literary critic Greg Johnson identifies the novel as a "contemporary Gothic satire" in the style of Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita (1955), and an "exploration of American culture."Johnson, 1987 p. 52: "...a dazzling Nabokovian artifice...", p. 52 Johnson remarks on the comic elements of the novel:
Theme Terming the novel a "naturalist allegory" and a "tour-de-force," biographer Joanne V. Creighton locates its thematic center:
Oates goes so far with self-parody as to portray her protagonist consulting and critiquing one of her essays, "Building Tension in the Short Story" (The Writer, June 1966).Creighton, 1979 p. 59, p. 163: Selected Bibliography
Footnotes
Sources Creighton, Joanne V. 1979. Joyce Carol Oates. Twayne Publishers, New York. Warren G. French, editor. Johnson, Greg. 1987. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, South Carolina. Johnson, Greg. 1994. Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne's studies in short fiction; no. 57. Twayne Publishers, New York. Knowles, John. 1997. "Nada at the Core" The New York Times, November 3, 1968. Nada at the Core Accessed January 15, 2025. Oates, Joyce Carol. 1968. Expensive People. Vanguard Press, New York.