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Loading... themby Joyce Carol OatesLibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendationsLoading...
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Overall I enjoyed the book and there were flashes of brilliance in the writing. But the story got bogged down with a lot of nonsense especially at the end with the riots and the crazy thoughts in the characters' minds were too crazy and tiresome after awhile. There was too much "stream of consciousness" type of writing that I do not like. It was painful to read. (  )1   lindawwilson | Nov 30, 2008 |  2904 them, by Joyce Carol Oates (read 1 Sep 1996) This book is replete with sexual couplings and lots of bad language. But it did remind me of Flaubert and even of Tolstoy (Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina)brought into the 1960's, but only at times. I found it a chore to read. It went on and on, one crazy, stupid, irrational thing after another, utterly plotless, absolutely without anyone one could admire. I am without desire to see any profound meaning in all the stupid things which go on in this book. I don't intend to read anything else by Oates. (  )1 Schmerguls | Jan 25, 2008 | "Them" is the saga of a dysfunctional lower-class family from 1937 to about 1966. A laundry list of domestic turmoil--rape, murder, assault, and accidental death--devastates the Wendall family as they travel throughout the poor neighborhoods of Detroit, chasing solvency and dignity in vain. The story focuses on the oldest daughter, Maureen who is bright enough and behaves well; she likes to read and makes the public library her sanctuary, where in the permanence of the words of Jane Austen novels she finds a comforting reality lacking in the instability of her home life. Her brother Jules is intelligent and so very intricate you wonder what he is about to do next with that brain that never stops ticking. This novel culminates with various kinds of violence in a race riot, against the backdrop of which the ideological diatribes, advocating large-scale social changes for the nation, seem distant from the private concerns of the Wendall family. But the Wendalls' privacy is impacted and influenced by the public force of human presence, the people we don't necessarily know: "them." Much of the novel is uncomfortable to read, not so much with regard to the physical violence as when the characters use abusive language to hurt each other, but it resonates with power and realism. (  ) siubhank | Oct 7, 2007 | barely worth the paper it's printed on. I recycled it. (  ) Batspit | Feb 15, 2007 | Ugh! why such good reviews. Painful, painful to read . . (  )1 jhowell | Dec 23, 2006 | 
 She focuses on story, with a style that cajoles the reader by regularly switching viewpoints within single paragraphs. The art is almost invisible. Her style allows the reader to focus on story without the intrusion of unfamiliar language, so artfully done, an exercise in event, an adventure in domestic darkness.
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0449206920, Mass Market Paperback)Winner of the National Book Award and in print for more than thirty years, them ranks as one of the most masterly portraits of postwar America ever written by a novelist. Including several new pages and text substantially revised and updated by the author, this Modern Library edition is the most current and accurate version available of Oates' seminal work.A novel about class, race, and the horrific, glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums. Loretta, beautiful and dreamy and full of regret by age sixteen, and her two children, Maureen and Jules, make up Oates' vision of the American fam-ily--broken, marginal, and romantically proud. The novel's title, pointedly uncapitalized, refers to those Americans who inhabit the outskirts of society--men and women, mothers and children--whose lives many authors in the 1960s had left unexamined. Alfred Kazin called her subject "the sheer rich chaos of American life." The Nation wrote, "When Miss Oates' potent, life-gripping imagination and her skill at narrative are conjoined, as they are preeminently in them, she is a prodigious writer." In addition to the text revisions, this--new edition contains an Afterword by the author and a new Introduction by Greg Johnson, Oates' biographer and the author of two monographs on the work of Joyce Carol Oates. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:12 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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