{"product_id":"expensive-people-isbn-9780812976540","title":"Expensive People","description":"Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In Expensive People, Oates takes a provocative and suspenseful look at the roiling secrets of America’s affluent suburbs. Set in the late 1960s, this first-person confession is narrated by Richard Everett, a precocious and obese boy who sees himself as a minor character in the alarming drama unfolding around him. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFascinated by yet alienated from his attractive, self-absorbed parents and the privileged world they inhabit, Richard incisively analyzes his own mismanaged childhood, his pretentious private schooling, his “successful-executive” father, and his elusive mother. In an act of defiance and desperation, eleven-year-old Richard strikes out in a way that presages the violence of ever-younger Americans in the turbulent decades to come.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA National Book Award finalist, \u003ci\u003eExpensive People\u003c\/i\u003e is a stunning combination of social satire and gothic horror. “You cannot put this novel away after you have opened it,” said \u003ci\u003eThe Detroit News\u003c\/i\u003e. “This is that kind of book–hypnotic, fascinating, and electrifying.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eExpensive People \u003c\/i\u003eis the second novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A\u003ci\u003e Garden of Earthly Delights\u003c\/i\u003e, them, and \u003ci\u003eWonderland\u003c\/i\u003e, are also available from the Modern Library.\u003cb\u003ePraise for The Wonderland Quartet\u003c\/b\u003e, four early novels by Joyce Carol Oates\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA Garden of Earthly Delights\u003cbr\u003eExpensive People\u003cbr\u003ethem\u003cbr\u003eWonderland\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Protean and prodigious are surely the words that describe Ms. Oates.  From the very beginning, as these impressive and diverse novels make clear, her talents and interests and strengths have never found comfort in fashionable restraint.  She's sought, instead, to do it all -- to face and brilliantly, inventively transact and give shape to as much of experience as possible, as if by no other means is a useful and persuasive gesture of moral imagination even conceivable.  For us readers these are valuable books.\" --\u003cb\u003eRichard Ford\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"These four novels reveal Oates' powers of observation and invention, her meticulous social documentation joined to her genius for forging unforgettable myths. She is one of the handful of great American novelists of the last hundred years. \" --\u003cb\u003eEdmund White \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This rich, kaleidoscopic suite of novels displays the young Joyce Carol Oates exercising her formidable artistic powers to portray a turbulent twentieth-century America. They offer the reader a singular opportunity to experience some of Oates's best writing and to witness her development, novel by novel, into one of our finest contemporary writers.\" --\u003cb\u003eGreg Johnson\u003c\/b\u003e, author of \u003ci\u003eInvisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"As a young writer, Joyce Carol Oates published four remarkable novels, \u003ci\u003eA Garden of Earthly Delights \u003c\/i\u003e(1967), \u003ci\u003eExpensive People \u003c\/i\u003e(1968),\u003ci\u003e them \u003c\/i\u003e(1969), and \u003ci\u003eWonderland\u003c\/i\u003e (1971). They were all nominated for the National Book Award, and Oates won the award for \u003ci\u003ethem\u003c\/i\u003e in 1970....Reprinting the series in modern paperback editions nearly forty years after their composition allows us a new perspective on their collective meaning and illuminates their place in Oates's overall career...The Wonderland Quartet, written in the \"white heat\" of youthful imagination and fervor, remains not only relevant but prophetic about the widening social and economic gulf in American society, the self-destructive violence of political extremism, and the terrifying hubris of science and technology. Bringing to life an unforgettable range of men and women, the Wonderland Quartet offers a compelling introduction to a protean and prodigious contemporary artist.\" -- \u003cb\u003eElaine Showalter\u003c\/b\u003e, from her introduction, which appears in all four of these new Modern Library editionsJoyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. The bestselling author of the novels \u003ci\u003eWe Were the Mulvaneys\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBlonde\u003c\/i\u003e, she has written numerous works of fiction as well as poetry, essays, criticism, and plays.Part I\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      I was a child murderer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I don’t mean child-murderer, though that’s an idea. I mean child murderer,  that is, a murderer who happens to be a child, or a child who happens to  be a murderer. You can take your choice. When Aristotle notes that man is  a rational animal one strains forward, cupping his ear, to hear which of  those words is emphasized—rational animal, rational animal? Which am I?  Child murderer, child murderer? It took me years to start writing this  memoir, but now that I’m started, now that those ugly words are typed out,  I could keep on typing forever. A kind of quiet, blubbering hysteria has  set in. You would be surprised, normal as you are, to learn how many  years, how many months, and how many awful minutes it has taken me just to  type that first line, which you read in less than a second: I was a child  murderer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    You think it’s easy?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Let me explain the second line. Child-murderer is an “idea.” I am writing  this memoir in a rented room, ignoble enough and smelling of garbage, and  outside in the street children are playing. Normal, like you and everyone  who chances upon these sweaty words of mine, the children are making  noise. Normal people always make noise. So it crosses my desperate,  corrupt, cobwebbed mind, my flabby, cringing mind, that those noises could  be silenced in the way I once silenced someone else. Already you are  struggling and tugging with your distaste, eh? You’re tempted to glance at  the back of this book to see if the last chapter is a prison scene and a  priest visits me and I either stoically refuse him or embrace his knees  manfully. Yes, you are thinking of doing that. So I might as well tell you  that my memoir will not end in any such convenient way; it isn’t  well-rounded or hemmed in by fate in the shape of novelistic architecture.  It certainly isn’t well-planned. It has no conclusion but just dribbles  off, in much the same way it begins. This is life. My memoir is not a  confession and it is not fiction to make money; it is simply . . . I am  not sure what it is. Until I write it all out I won’t even know what I  think about it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Look at my hands tremble! I am not well. I weigh two hundred and fifty  pounds and I am not well, and if I told you how old I am you would turn  away with a look of revulsion. How old am I? Did I stop growing on that  day when “it” happened, note the shrewd passivity of that phrase, as if I  hadn’t made “it” happen myself, or did I maybe freeze into what I was, and  outside of that shell layers and layers of fat began to form? Writing this  is such hard work that I have to stop and wipe myself with a large  handkerchief. I sweat all over. And those children outside my window! I  think they are unkillable anyway. Life keeps on, getting noisier and  noisier as I get quieter and quieter, and all these normal, noisy, healthy  people around me keep pressing in, mouths full of laughing teeth and  biceps charmingly bulging. At the second in which the slick lining of my  stomach finally bursts, some creature next door will turn her radio from  Bill Sharpe’s “Weather Round-Up” to Guy Prince’s “Top-Ten Jamboree.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This memoir is a hatchet to slash through my own heavy flesh and through  the flesh of anyone else who happens to get in the way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    One thing I want to do, my readers, is to minimize the tension between  writer and reader. Yes, there is tension. You think I am trying to put  something over on you, but that isn’t true. It isn’t true. I am honest and  dogged and eventually the truth will be told; it will just take time  because I want to make sure everything gets in. I realize my sentences are  slack and flabby and composed of too many small words—I’ll see if I can’t  fix that. And you are impatient because I can’t seem to get started  telling this story in any normal way (I don’t mean to be ironic so much,  irony is an unpleasant character trait), and you would like to know,  whimsically enough, whether I am in a mental institution now or crazy in  some less official setting, whether I am repentant (a tongueless monk,  maybe), whether much gore will be splattered throughout these pages, many  violent encounters between male and female, and whether after these  extravaganzas I am justly punished. Just punishment after illicit  extravaganzas is usually served up for the benefit   of the reader, who feels better. But, you see, this is not fiction. This   is life. My problem is that I don’t know what I am doing. I lived all   this mess but I don’t know what it is. I don’t even know what I mean by  “it.” I have a story to tell, yes, and no one else could tell it but me,   but if I tell it now and not next year it will come out one way, and if I  could have forced my fat, heaving body to begin this a year ago   it would have been a different story then. And it’s possible that I’m  lying without knowing it. Or telling the truth in some weird, symbolic way  without knowing it, so only a few psychoanalytic literary critics (there  are no more than three thousand) will have access to the truth, what “it”  is.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So there is tension, all right, because I couldn’t begin the story by  stating: One morning in January a yellow Cadillac pulled up to a curb. And  I couldn’t begin the story by stating: He was an only child. (Both these  statements are quite sensible, by the way, though I could never talk about  myself in the third person.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And I couldn’t begin the story by stating: Elwood Everett met and wed  Natashya Romanov when he was thirty-two and she was nineteen. (Those are  my parents! It took me some time to type out their names.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And I couldn’t begin the story with this pathetic flourish: The closet  door opened suddenly and there he stood, naked. He stared in at me and I  stared out at him. (And that also will come to pass, though I hadn’t  intended to mention it so soon.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    All these devices are fine and I offer them to any amateur writer who  wants them, but for me they don’t work because . . . I’m not sure why. It  must be because the story I have to tell is my life, synonymous with my  life, and no life begins anywhere. If you have to begin your life with a  sentence, better make it a brave summing up and not anything coy: I was a  child murderer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My readers, don’t fret, don’t nibble at your nails: indeed I was   punished. Indeed I am being punished. My misery is proof of God’s  existence—yes, I’ll offer that to you as a special bonus! It will do your  souls good to read of my suffering. You’ll want to know when my crime took  place, and where. And what do I look like, this fat degenerate, dripping  sweat over his manuscript, and how the hell old am I anyway, and whom did  I kill, and why, and what sense does it make?National Book Award finalist; The Wonderland Quartet","brand":"Modern Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44886268772581,"sku":"NP9780812976540","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812976540.jpg?v=1767726534","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/expensive-people-isbn-9780812976540","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}