Them (Modern Library)
by Joyce Carol Oates
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joyce Carol OatesIntroduction: Elaine Showalter
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-09-12
ISBN: 0345484401
Number of pages: 576
Publisher: Modern Library
Book Reviews of Them (Modern Library)
Book Review: Acute exposure of fragility beneath hard, shielding façades
Summary: 5 Stars
Apathy is a weapon. Not speaking about their disappointments - as working class kids traditionally aren't supposed to do - make the two main characters of this story, Jules and Maureen, victims of silence and isolation. As Jules and Maureen grow up they learn to use apathy themselves as a weapon with which they can obliterate the outside world, disconnect themselves from a society they find ugly and incomprehensible. Alienation nearly kills them during their adolescence, a time in which Oates names them "Children of Silence," when they're forced to conform and to submit to performing tedious, repetitious routines, taught to accept a supposedly concrete and unchangeable reality of poverty and inaccessible higher education.
Apathy is a way to do away with an imposed reality. They use the same weapon that once was used on them, and they begin to understand why their parents avoided intimacy and emotional connection. Expressing feelings and the intimacy that thereby follows clears way for inner dreams to come into the open. And to share dreams is dangerous, because the world tears them down. It's because Maureen can't help but dream of a different life that she wants to die in the powerlessness and futility of it all. As Jules and Maureen themselves are betrayed and see what apathy can do to the hopeful, who wish nothing more than to have real, authentic love, they realize they aren't innocent themselves and have no one to blame. If no one taught them to be true to a higher ideal, if they have no moral imperative to live up to, then how can they expect the ones they love not to hurt them? And, as the weapon backfires on them, they realize that they too are guilty of victimization and that they have become as heartless as their parents.
As they meet apathy now, young adults, Jules searching for guidance and rescue, Maureen seeking escape and refuge in passive serfdom of middle class life going nowhere fast, they struggle to cope with the silence and the void of feelings. Jules refuses to make this his inescapable destiny and becomes as lost and broken as his parents, while Maureen denounces and runs away from her family and past. She stares into a mirror and sees nothing staring back at her and knows what they have done to her and what she in turn will do to her children if she doesn't somehow break the destructive pattern.
Jules and Maureen feel the pain of not having their expectations met and know that their suffering is real but don't know how to communicate it because of their parents and their own submission to silence. And so they pray for someone they can open up and be vulnerable to, someone to share their desires and dreams with. Their actions become the loud scream they have been keeping inside their whole lives. Too late they realize their actions are hurting those on the outside they've been reaching for their whole lives, though they never thought of those outside their shared history as anything but "them." In the end they see that they are "them," that they are the ones on the outside, because they have never connected with anyone, as their destuctive, isolated family and its history is all they've ever known.
Summary of Them (Modern Library)
Joyce Carol Oates?s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. As powerful and relevant today as it on its initial publication, them chronicles the tumultuous lives of a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, from the 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her ?potent, life-gripping imagination,? Oates traces the aspirations and struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who is filled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequent destinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight to survive in a world of violence and danger.Winner of the National Book Award, them is an enthralling novel about love, class, race, and the inhumanity of urban life. It is, raves The New York Times, ?a superbly accomplished vision.?
Them is the third novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.
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