Expensive People (36 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
And he would say, “Richard, let me assure you of this: hallucinations are as vivid as reality, and I respect everything you say. I know that you are suffering just as much as if you had killed your mother.”
And so in the end I stopped saying anything at all.
Because I stopped raving and weeping, I remained in the Normal World. You might have seen me, years ago, sitting sadly on a park bench, doing nothing. Not even waiting any longer. I was a quiet, bespectacled child growing into a quiet, bespectacled teen-ager (far removed from the happy, sweating hordes led by the music of Dr. Muggeridge's pipes!). I sleepwalked my way through the years, and as I slept I ate, and as I walked I ate, because there was this peculiar hol-lowness inside me that I had to fill—but that's just sentiment, ignore it.
So I am waiting out the last minutes of my life sentence of freedom, and outside on the street are—what now?—some kids playing. They don't act like kids though; their movements are jerky and brutal when they throw and catch their ball, and one of the children is smoking a cigarette, and the big one is always ready to punch the others in the arm or back—there he goes again, the little bastard! Ah, summertime here in the city! I pull toward me a few cans and my rusty can opener. Time to begin … Did I explain to you that I left home at sixteen and was not lamented, and Father sends me an allowance that is generous enough to keep me well stocked with food? Look at the size of this can of apricots! Enough to stuff a horse! Yes, my dear harsh Father appeared to me at last, after eleven years of disguise. But I did find him at last, and isn't that what we all crave, a confrontation with the truth? I was confronted with the truth. And I found my true mother, or one of her truer selves, that girl Nancy Romanow (younger than I am now), and of course here in my room are many of her stories, everything I could get hold of, and I read them and reread them and sometimes think that I am coming close to … something, I don't know what.
As for God—did I find God through suffering and repentance? Indeed not. I am afraid not. God came to me in a dream once disguised as Father and backslapping and loud as usual, but his slaps on my back were harder than need be. And that is the secret of the backslapper— he is really pounding you to death. In my reading I came across Freud's remark that everyone's notion of God is based upon his unconscious notion of his father. Well, I am stuck with a sadistic, happy, backslapping God and to hell with that.
And here are eight bananas, just flecked with brown and therefore
ready to be guzzled, and as soon as you turn your back I will begin. The softness of bananas, the hardness of peanut brittle, the pliant cool sanity of lettuce! I have sauces and jams which I will pour over those pieces of bread and those cookies which have gone stale, never fear. This must be the end of the memoir. I excuse you at this point. My career as a writer now ends, and I don't have time to look through what I've written. Let it stand. I am being carried along on the wave of a most prodigious hunger. All I ask is the strength to fill the emptiness inside me, to stuff it once and for all!
That, and the fierce consolation of knowing that whatever I did, whatever degradations and evils, stupidities, blunders, moronic intrusions, whatever single ghastly act I did manage to achieve, it was done out of freedom, out of choice. This is the only consolation I have in the face of death, my readers: the thought of my free will. But I must confess that there are moments when I doubt even this consolation …
Expensive People:
THE CONFESSIONS OF A “MINOR CHARACTER”
Expensive People,
originally published in 1968, was imagined as the second of an informal, thematically (but not literally) integrated trilogy of novels written in the 1960's, the first and third being
A Garden of Earthly Delights
(1966) and
them
(1969). These novels, differing considerably in subject matter, language, and tone, have in common the use of a youthful protagonist in his or her quintessentially American adventures; they were conceived by the author as critiques of America— American culture, American values, American dreams—as well as narratives in which romantic ambitions are confronted by what must be called “reality.”
Appearing in the fall of 1968,
Expensive People,
with its climactic episode of self-destructive violence, was perceived as an expression of the radical discontent, the despair, the bewilderment and outrage of a generation of young and idealistic Americans confronted by an America of their elders so steeped in political hypocrisy and cynicism as to seem virtually irremediable except by the most extreme means. What is assassination but a gesture of political impotence?—what are most “crimes of passion” except gestures of self-destruction, self-annihilation? When the child murderer of
Expensive People
realizes that he has become, or has been, in fact, all along, a mere “Minor Character” in his mother's life, he is made to realize absolute impotence; inconsequence; despair. He has slipped forever “out of focus.” A desperate
act of (premeditated) matricide will not restore his soul to him but will at least remove the living object of his love and grief.
A complex, multi-tiered novel can be an exercise in architectural design and it can be, in the writing, true labor; a novel like
Expensive People
with its relaxed first-person narration, its characteristically succinct and chatty chapters, and its direct guidance of the reader's reading experience, can ride upon the ease of its own melting, as Robert Frost said of the lyric poem. Of my numerous novels
Expensive People
glimmers in my memory as the most fluidly written in its first-draft version; my precise memories of writing it, giving voice to the doomed Richard Everett in long unbroken mildly fevered sessions, are tied to the upstairs, rear study of the first of the several houses of my married life, a brick colonial, modest, with four bedrooms, at 2500 Woodstock Drive, Detroit, Michigan. (What happy days: at the time I was an instructor in English at the University of Detroit where I taught, with unflagging enthusiasm and a boundless energy that perplexes me today, four courses including two generously populated sections of “Expository Writing”—freshman composition.)
The “I” of my protagonist Richard became so readily the “eye” of the novelist that, at times, the barrier between us dissolved completely and the voice in which I wrote was, if not strictly speaking my own, an only slightly exaggerated approximation of my own. (The most immediate model for the novel's peculiar tone was evidently Thomas Nashe's
The Unfortunate Traveler: or, The Life of Jack Wilton,
1594, often called “the first novel in English”; my narrator alludes to “
that other unfortunate traveler
from whom I have stolen so much” in Part I, Chapter 23, but in rereading the ebullient sixteenth-century work I can see only occasional and glancing similarities.) The fluid writing experience of
Expensive People
would have been impossible if I had not worked from an earlier first-person “confession” also narrated by a disturbed and self-destructive adolescent boy, in a more subdued, naturalistic key; this was a completed novel of about two hundred fifty pages with which I was dissatisfied, as an unworthy successor to
A Garden of Earthly Delights,
which yet had its hooks in my soul and could not be discarded. (With the completion of
Expensive People,
however, the manuscript was quickly and unsentimentally tossed away: no more than self-conscious Richard Everett would I have wished to keep any
evidence of early botched and faltering versions of my more “eloquent” self.)
What a powerful hold the world of “expensive people” had upon me in those years! The short story collections
The Wheel of Love
(197?) and
Marriages & Infidelities
(1972) focus upon similar themes, frequently from the perspective of estranged and hyperesthesiac adolescents like the protagonists of “Boy and Girl,” “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction, and Began My Life Over Again,” “Stalking,” “Stray Children,” “Problems of Adjustment in Survivors of Natural/Unnatural Disasters,” and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” The novella
Cybele
(1979) most clearly resembles
Expensive People
—it is set in precisely the identical suburban-Detroit world—but its tone is far more pitiless and unyielding than Richard Everett's; the voice is that of the ancient goddess Cybele mockingly recounting the rake's-progress misadventures of one of her doomed mortal lovers.
—
Normal men and women—by whom I mean, I suppose, non-novelists— may be surprised to learn that novelists are haunted by a quickened sense of mortality when they are writing novels; the terror of dying before the work is completed, the interior vision made exterior, holds us in its grip. Once the work is completed, however, once transformed into a book, an object, to be held in the hand, the novelist does permit himself or herself to feel a modicum of accomplishment: not pride so much as simple relief.
Here it is. Now I
can
die.
Rereading a novel after many years is thus a disorienting experience. For while there does remain the original, however unmerited satisfaction of the achievement in itself, there now arises, unexpectedly, a sense of profound and irrevocable loss.
The novel has become, in the intervening years, a species of “look-back” time, to use the poetic astrophysical term; it has, for all its immediacy to others' eyes, a fossil-image glimmer for the writer. Behind many of the proper names of
Expensive People (“Fernwood,”
“Johns Behemoth,” “Epping Way,” “Bebe Hofstadter,” “Mr. Body,” even “Spark,” et al), as behind a scrim, there exist authentic names, and authentic entities; the descriptive scenes bear witness to a greedily appropriated authentic landscape, that of Birmingham/Bloomfield Hills,
Michigan; at every interstice, in virtually every turn of phrase, use of metaphor, literary allusion (to, for instance, Nada's note to herself, to revise “Death and the Maiden” and change its title—which title, changed, will be “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”), literary parody, and aside, I am forcibly reminded not only of my old long-forgotten sources but of my former, now lost self in the act of writing: inventing. Yet more painfully I am reminded of the losses of dear friends and acquaintances of that crowded era of my life more than two decades ago; and of the era itself, so tumultuous in our American history and so crucial in our fractured sense of our national identity. My romance with Detroit, I've characterized this phase of my life. My romance with novel-writing itself.
So the vertigo of memory haunts me in rereading
Expensive People.
Did expensive houses sell for as little as $80,500 in those years? Comedy ends abruptly with death and since so many of my “expensive people” have indeed died, including the exemplary woman to whom
Expensive People
was dedicated, isn't the jocular tone of the narrator inappropriate? Isn't it … too unknowing? too
young?
Even the novel's thinly codified secret (having to do with the execution of an ambitious woman writer as fit punishment for having gone beyond the “limits of her world”—upstate New York) strikes me as sobering and not, as I'd surely intended, blackly comic. I recall too that the shooting of a woman by her son was based upon an actual incident of that era, but I can't recall any of the details of that case, nor even if I made any effort to seek them out. For the writer, emblematic material is most highly charged when it is only glancingly and obliquely suggested; once the idea presents itself, our instinct is to turn discreetly away. Sometimes even to shade our eyes.
Most of
Expensive People
is fiction, of course. An invented tapestry of “observed” data stretched upon a structure of parable-like simplicity. I saw myself then, as I see myself now, as a perennially romantic traveler, an “eye” enraptured by the very jumble and clamor of America. Richard Everett is speaking of his parents but he may well be speaking of all the inhabitants of his world when he confesses, “Yes, I loved them.”
JOYCE CAROL OATES
January, 1990
ELAINE SHOWALTER
is professor emeritus of English at Princeton University, where she taught courses on contemporary fiction, women's writing, and nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature. The author or editor of eighteen books on English and American literature, she has reviewed contemporary literature and culture both for scholarly journals and for periodicals such as
The Guardian Review, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, The Washington Post Book Review,
and the
Los Angeles Times.
Her current project is a literary history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.
Maya Angelou
•
A. S. Byatt
•
Caleb Carr
•
Christopher Cerf
•
Charles Frazier
•
Vartan Gregorian
•
Richard Howard
•
Charles Johnson
•
Jon Krakauer
•
Edmund Morris
•
Azar Nafisi
•
Joyce Carol Oates
•
Elaine Pagels
•
John Richardson
•
Salman Rushdie
•
Oliver Sacks
•
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
•
Carolyn See
•
William Styron
•
Gore Vidal
A NOTE ON THE TYPEThe principal text of this Modern Library edition
was set in a digitized version of Janson, a typeface that
dates from about 1690 and was cut by Nicholas Kis,
a Hungarian working in Amsterdam. The original matrices have
survived and are held by the Stempel foundry in Germany.
Hermann Zapf redesigned some of the weights and sizes for
Stempel, basing his revisions on the original design.