Finished Sa 11/26/16
This is a long and sprawling work, and I loved every page.
Another novel (like SACRIFICE) where the action turns on a sexual assault.
Michael Sr.- The Good Republican. Small farmer and business owner who can't 'get respect'. His life unwinds completely, yet his family always remembered his 'better days'.
I'm writing this almost three weeks after finishing the book, but this was one of the best in a long line of good novels from this summer.
The youngest boy is separated by age from his oldest brother by so much that his feelings and observations of 'The Mulvaneys' is much different from his siblings. He almost feels as if he has missed the reality of being a Mulvaney. Makes you try to say exactly when your own family was at its apex.
From the NY times review-
"The Mulvaney family's scruffy Eden, in the fictional town of Mount Ephraim, is called High Point Farm. This peaceable kingdom is under the dominion of parents still so in love that they embarrass their children -- who include a star high school athlete, a popular cheerleader and a class valedictorian. By way of contrast, we also get a Great Bad Place reminiscent of the swamp in ''First Love,'' a lake with water snakes, ''repulsive soft muck like quicksand'' and a resort run by an affable alcoholic eager to drag down the father of the family.
The Mulvaneys' fall from grace begins when Marianne, a pep-squad Clarissa Harlowe, is raped by a local boy and her father's dormant dysfunction wakes up and starts rattling its cage. Esthetically, it's a joy to watch a pro like Ms. Oates take apart this proud, happy and likable family step by inexorable step -- there goes Marianne! here comes the booze! there goes the farm! -- while making you hope all along that she'll spare them. And the modest measure of recompense and reconciliation she eventually hands the survivors doesn't outrage our sense of probability, however our sense of justice may suffer.
''We Were the Mulvaneys'' makes us glad to forgive its trespasses. The brainy son's ongoing agon with Darwinian theory probably fits in thematically -- in what book would it not fit thematically? -- but it sure is ongoing. And Marianne's turn-the-other-cheekiness comes to seem implausible. She's raped, her father exiles her from the family, her mother acquiesces -- yet her anger seems to be so well sublimated that it never makes it onto the page. On the other hand, Ms. Oates honors the novelist's obligation not to play favorites and to let us know how all her characters see things. Corinne Mulvaney is justified in cutting off the dangerous friendship she and Michael once had with the alcoholic resort owner; yet the man is justified in feeling hurt when Corinne insists on paying him for putting them up overnight.
Occasionally Ms. Oates's prose sounds canned and careless (''Abelove irradiated a powerful masculine heat''), but she gives us enough small luminous moments to carry several novels: a nighttime walk where the full moon looks like ''a candled egg''; hairs on a woman's arms lifting ''like filings to a magnet''; the aging, drunken Michael Mulvaney telling his son that he regrets not joining the Marines: '' 'I got married instead, and by the time I was your age I was up to here in it.' Drawing a swift crude forefinger beneath his chin.''
Still, ''We Were the Mulvaneys'' works not simply because of its meticulous details and gestures, or because ''family'' is a hot-button issue these days, or because Ms. Oates has borrowed the primal narrative of Western culture to give her story subliminal oomph. Mere hard work and canny calculation could get a writer that far. What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is something stronger and spookier: her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something happening on the other side that we'd swear was life itself."
Link at Amazon reviews-
https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0452282829
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