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By Joyce Carol Oates
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 2001
A happy family, the Mulvaneys. After decades of marriage, Mom and Dad are still in love--and the proud parents of a brood of
youngsters that includes a star athlete, a class valedictorian, and a popular cheerleader. Home is an idyllic place called
High Point Farm. And the bonds of attachment within this all-American clan do seem both deep and unconditional: "Mom paused
again, drawing in her breath sharply, her eyes suffused with a special lustre, gazing upon her family one by one, with what
crazy unbounded love she gazed upon us, and at such a moment my heart would contract as if this woman who was my mother had
slipped her fingers inside my rib cage to contain it, as you might hold a wild, thrashing bird to comfort it."
But as we all know, Eden can't last forever. And in the hands of Joyce Carol Oates, who's chronicled just about every variety
of familial dysfunction, you know the fall from grace is going to be a doozy. By the time all is said and done, a rape occurs,
a daughter is exiled, much alcohol is consumed, and the farm is lost. Even to recount these events in retrospect is a trial for
the Mulvaney offspring, one of whom declares: "When I say this is a hard reckoning I mean it's been like squeezing thick drops
of blood from my veins." In the hands of a lesser writer, this could be the stuff of a bad television movie. But this is Oates's
26th novel, and by now she knows her material and her craft to perfection. We Were the Mulvaneys is populated with such richly
observed and complex characters that we can't help but care about them, even as we wait for disaster to strike them down.
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