We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)

on Tuesday, June 08, 2004 I wrote about this book:

I have finished reading this book. It was a hard read though, not only because of the story but also cause the style of writing I guess?
At one time I thought shall I continue, but the story was so intriguing, i wanted to know what happened. I am glad i did. loved the storyline. I have cried my eyes out 2 nights in a row.

( )

I didn't find this easy to read. Marianne and her parents annoyed the heck out of me and this was what really ruined the book. They were all pathetic in the way they handled tragedy. For awhile it looked like it might get more interesting and then the story wandered and pretty much fell apart. Shame. ( )

"We Mulvaneys are joined at the heart!"

Written, as interpreted by the youngest boy of the family (Judd, Ranger, among half a dozen other nicknames), before and after a calamity that changes their family forever, the Mulvaneys are seemingly the prized possession of American life in the mid-1970s.

Each one of the four miniature Mulvaneys (some more pipsqueak than the others, and not including the countless number of animals on their farm, which to them are practically family) have their own unique emotional attachment with each other. They do things as one single entity, but also differently; they are provided their own space and free will to certain limits. Call it family. Finding a platform amongst the rising sense of chaos, a war looming, the fear of falling apart. When Ranger, the youngest, our narrator, hears his mom's tale about providence, when she was saved by God one snowy night, he felt as if his mother was clutching his heart, keeping it from escaping his chest. These are caring people each in their own ways.

These God-fearing people had a child's inquisitiveness, and many of them too sensitive to the real world that the outside community began to see them as weak, in need of putting out of their misery (once they succumbed to it) just like an injured and unrecoverable animal. The other town folk, after Marianne is raped by one of her own classmates, see a need to relieve them of their pain, ignore them, cast them out into the wilderness that was not there. And maybe they too prophesied a similar sensitivity and couldn't bare to see them suffer anymore. The reader doesn't know. The reader is only aware of the events and Corrine's (mostly) fevered attempts at patching together the family--an obvious parallel to Joyce Carol Oates herself. And this is one among many problems that progressively worsen after the big reveal.

After the Mulvaney clan has been decimated and the secret is out, and although the father acts realistically, it's still cold, and unnatural, and unwarranted for his character and back story (we're merely presented with facts ranging from that he's a tough, hard working Republican, to that he supports the war effort). Once the family is dispersed things become directionless. The first 200 pages didn't build a showcase of individual isolation, so when that isolation eventually comes rolling by, we couldn't care less.

I wanted more emotional investment. Corrine, or the mother's story about being saved by angels, that once touched Ranger's heart, was a great escape, and something I could've used more of to warrant Part II of the book.

The second major problem I had with this book is that it becomes too cutesy it begins to drown in the character's own stoic charm. There are too many exclamation marks. Characters are always on the brink of unrivaled giddy. My stomach churns. What was endearing at first makes way for the melodramatic. Italics run rampant. Internal dialogue, those long passages that profess to reveal everything to the reader, needed to be caged and leashed. (It's my own personal judgement, but exclamations only work this obtusely for sarcasm and actual screaming, not a character's intrinsic lack of depth.)

This all doesn't come easily, though. I wanted to like this book, but no kind of magic could bestow this kind of lackluster development into my continuing attention. Oats is not only a prolific writer, but sometimes even a great one. Various sections of We Were the Mulvaneys revealed her true greatness, but nowhere near the breadth of the book.

"We're not like that," Corrine says to her husband when she finds out that he beat up the boy that raped his daughter.

He responds by saying, "Maybe we are."

And thus, we are supposed to believe the next 250 pages that follow, the idea that perfection is only perfect because it has been left alone, spared from the real world, their children growing up in a chaotic environment like all children have to. All of this must be acquired and processed within just a few lines of dialogue.

Good luck taking that adventure yourself when the writer isn't even there to tell you north from south. ( )

Nello stile dell'autrice, qui prende di mira la famiglia stile mulinobianco. ( )

Tried to read, not a grabing novel. ( )