We Were the Mulvaneys

He querido leer este libro desde hace años, cualquiera que me conozca sabe lo mucho que lo busqué por todos lados, incluso en librerías en Estados Unidos, por algún motivo su edición había sido descontinuada y se habían retirado todas las copias disponibles de librerías.

Por fin lo puedo tener en mis manos y he podido darme el enorme gusto de leerlo, no solo ha cubierto mis expectativas, las ha superado, no me ha defraudado.

Cuando leí hace algún tiempo el Libro de los Baltimore de Joël Dicker, alguien comentó que era un tipo remake de este libro, bueno, es verdad que tienen su punto de coincidencia, creo que sobre todo en el estilo literario escogido por ambos autores y que cuentan la historia de una familia, por lo demás, show more bueno, no puedo compararlos.

Ya había leído a Joyce Carol Oates antes, así que si, conocía su enorme calidad literaria, pero por sobre cualquier tema técnico que se pueda decir de su estilo narrativo, hay algo que la caracteriza y es su gran y tremenda capacidad para transmitir, es apabullante leer cualquier cosa que ella escriba porque indudablemente te enfrentarás a sentir cada cosa que cuenta y muchas veces no son cosas agradables, sin embargo en mi caso particular me encanta encontrarme con libros que me muevan la fibra, que me lleguen.

Este libro está contado en mi primera persona por el hijo pequeño de los Mulvaney, Judd quien nos va narrando toda la historia del gran declive de esta preciosa y perfecta familia americana.

No voy a decir o a comentar nada sobre la historia porque de verdad es algo que vale la pena conocer y lo que en ella se desvela es tremendo, leerlo sin saber nada es algo que hay que vivir.

Solo decir que es un impresionante libro, en historia, en narrativa y por sobre cualquier otra cosa, en hacer que se te mueva desde la punta de los pies hasta el último de los cabellos.

Con esta autora siempre termino preguntándome ¿cómo le hace para sentarse a escribir en primera persona cosas como estas?

Un libro absoluta, completa y totalmente recomendable, un libro que tiene una reputación completamente ganada. show less

It's the perfect title for this novel. There's a pain of loss in it, and that captures the novel's dominant sentiment. It was both refreshing and heartbreaking to read about the Mulvaney family, a family that loves to laugh, the kind of family you'd like to have as your own. Heartbreaking for the tragedy that befalls them and unearths their fragility, their inexperience at grappling with something on this scale, and what it does to them.

It's a story about mistakenly believing normality can be restored without effort, about how religion both heals and harms, about powerlessness and blame and responsibility. Most importantly, this novel (set in 1976) brilliantly expresses the argument for everything we are fighting to have happen today show more when these circumstances arise, and why we have fought for it. The primary counterargument at the time would have been, what happens to the Mulvaneys would have happened to the whole town. But a burden shared among many eases the burden for all, and pulling together is not the same as pulling apart. That goes for families, too. show less

I doubt there’s another contemporary American novelist with more wordy talent and abundant energy than Joyce Carol Oates. Oh sure, there are mystery writers who produce new stories as fast as blood flows from their victims; then there’s that fellow who cashed in on an avalanche of Star Wars “sequels;�€? and don’t even get me started on the Barbara Cartland Romance Factory. But for deep, thick fiction which pokes and prods at American life with the precision of a lab scientist, no one comes close to Joyce Carol Oates. Not even the masterful John Updike who writes books in the same way rabbits make babies.

Since the publication of By the North Gate in 1963, Oates has written 40 novels, 25 short story collections, 10 show more volumes of essays and seven plays (that’s not even counting the countless anthologies she’s edited). I might be a little off on those numbers, but if I am, it’s on the conservative side. Let’s face it, every time you walk into a bookstore, there’s a “new Joyce Carol Oatesâ€? propped up in a neat little pyramid on the front table.

But yet I suspect, for all her jaw-dropping productivity, she might just be the author everyone thinks they’ve read, but never have. In some households, her books remain on the bookshelf with unblemished spines, dustily wedged between V.S. Naipaul and Flannery O’Connor.

I’m here to confess an incredible felony. I’ve never once cracked the spine of a JCO tome. For the past 10 years, I’ve had 12 Oates books wedged on my “Oâ€? shelf—everything from them to Because It Is Bitter And Because It Is My Heart. But it took Oprah Winfrey, God bless her, to finally turn me into an Oates reader, not just an Oates wannabe. Earlier this month, the talk show goddess anointed JCO’s 1996 novel We Were the Mulvaneys as the latest pick for her book club. This makes the third Oprah’s Book Club entry in recent months (Drowning Ruth and House of Sand and Fog were the others) that’s been impressively rich in theme and character and not just touchy-feely, group-hug pap-n-fluff. Oprah scoffers should be prepared to dismount from their high horses (I can say this, being a former scoffer myself).

We Were the Mulvaneys is not a pretty novel, nor is it exactly a perfect novel. In fact, reading the tragic events sprawled across these 454 pages is something akin to ripping a week-old Band-Aid off your leg. You won’t draw it out, each nerve ending firing off pain signals, every shin hair clinging to the adhesive. Nope, you’ll close your eyes, take a deep breath, and get it over with quick. You’ll be glad you did. Know how the pain and pleasure mix sadistically in those first post-Band Aid moments? That’s exactly how you’ll feel after you’re done with We Were the Mulvaneys.

Oates uses a word-scalpel to look at a typical American family during those two vulnerable decades—the 1970s and the 1980s. When I say “typical,â€? I mean typical. We’ve all met people like Mike and Corinne Mulvaney and their kids, Mike Jr., Patrick, Marianne and Judd. Hell, some of us are the Mulvaneys—that’s what makes the bandage-rip so powerful in this domestic dysfunction tale. Oates’ literary blade nicks our skin, slides under the scabs we’ve tried to ignore for years, and if we allow, gently exposes that tender pink skin beneath. Reading the novel might just be therapeutic for some scab-hearted folks. Put another way, it could be the equivalent of getting a prime-time hug from Ms. Winfrey.

Mike Mulvaney owns a successful roofing business in Mt. Ephraim, an upstate New York town whose “havesâ€? live alongside the “have-notsâ€? with tacit acceptance. Mike has earned a reputation as a “damned nice guyâ€?—solid businessman country club member, textbook father. He and Corinne live out on High Point Farm, a menagerie of cows, horses, kids and cats. Deer come to their pond to drink at night. Their front yard, full of seasonal pumpkins and scarecrows, has been photographed for a calendar. Corinne sells antiques from the barn out back (whenever she can bear to part with her rummage-sale treasures, that is). Their children are the kind whose pictures dominate the school yearbook: star athlete, cheerleader, valedictorian. In short, it’s a happy place where Norman Rockwell would be proud to live.

Until Valentine’s Day 1976, that is.

On that night, tragedy strikes the Mulvaney clan like a virus-coated knife. Nothing will be the same after Marianne returns from the school prom, her eyes glazed and her thoughts flat-lining. The family refuses to face the events of that evening and, little by little, they pull away from each other and alienate themselves from the rest of the town. At times, it’s unbearable to watch the disintegration of this American family. The reason it’s so painful? Without our hardly realizing it, Oates has made us fall in love with this family in the preceding pages. She has made the Mulvaneys people we know, or think we know, intimately—all in the space of less than 100 pages. When the crumbling begins, we want to avert our eyes…but of course we don’t—the words on the page demand our constant attention.

At first, Oates circles the perimeter of what happened on Valentine’s Day, intriguing us with the mystery, drawing us into the dynamics of this ill-fated family. The story unfolds in one long flashback, narrated by the adult Judd, the youngest child of the family who later went on to become the editor of the local newspaper. Judd becomes an investigative reporter as he burrows into the unknown depths of his family: “Everything recorded here happened and it’s my task to suggest how, and why.â€? But it’s not an easy task because, as Judd says, “In a family, what isn’t spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.â€? Then, later: “And so it became a household of silence. As if in the aftermath of a violent detonation.â€?

Suffering the worst from the domestic explosion are Mike Sr. and Marianne. The father spurns his daughter, the first in a series of bad choices which culminate in his fate as a stumble-bum alcoholic. “A man gets to be the sum of his bad luck,â€? he later self-prophecies, cracking open another can of ale. It’s as unnerving as watching Ward Cleaver burn holes in his sweater with a cigarette.

Marianne also commits emotional suicide, leading what her mother calls a “rag-quilt life.â€? Like the ever-cheerful Corinne, Marianne applies happiness like it was lip gloss—she’s shiny on the outside, but it’s so easy to see through to the chapped soul beneath. Like her father, Marianne’s life becomes a series of bad choices, mostly having to do with keeping others at an emotional arm’s length.

We Were the Mulvaneys is also about how a town secretly enjoys watching a stable, happy family reduced to tatters and scraps. Oates details the social ostracism in subtle, painful strokes. It’s as if no one has the right to be the Great American Family—certainly not during the Have a Nice Day 70s.

Oates has a keen eye for contemporary families, startling us with sentences like: Judd said, “It’s the way families are, sometimes. A thing goes wrong and no one knows how to fix it and years pass and—no one knows how to fix it.â€? He spoke quickly, almost combatively.

I’m also fond of this passage, which describes Marianne and her cheerleading clique at the high school (this is, of course, before Things Go Wrong):

Because they were good-girl girls they believed they were not snobbish and they competed with one another in being friendly, being nice, to the most obscure students; the most pathetic losers; like Della Rae Duncan, and other “trailer-villageâ€? kids. Their smiles were golden coins scattered carelessly in the school corridors, their Hi’s! and H’lo’s! and How are you’s! were melodic as the cries of spring birds.

There is more, so much more, crammed into this bursting-at-the-seams novel. And there lies part of the problem with We Were the Mulvaneys: it is so stuffed with the details of American family life that at times it resembles one of those photo albums you keep in your closet—you know, the one with all the extra Polaroids slipped between the pages, the snapshots spilling into your lap whenever you haul the album out to show visitors. Similarly, there’s a lot at work in Oates’ overstuffed book. When you’ve got this much going on, there’s usually something which can be cut, or at least trimmed down. In this case, my attention started to waver during the last third of the book, when the family is scattered to the four winds, trying to reglue the shards of their lives. But then, maybe I was just exhausted by all that Oates had put me through in the preceding 350 pages.

Certainly, the length of the book is daunting, but the language is never dull. Apart from the overuse of the exclamation point and the word “acidâ€? (“a dazzle of acid-sharp spring sunshineâ€?), Oates is a perfect wordsmith, using language like a scientist uses a microscope. Her talent is overwhelmingly keen and We Were the Mulvaneys is a sharp reminder of why so many bookshelves are lined with her volumes. For some of us, it’s high time we started dusting off our Oates. show less

Boken Det var vi som var Mulvaneys av Joyce Carol Oates handlar om familjen Mulvaney som bor på gården High Point norr om New York. De framstår länge som en idealfamilj: framgångsrik, karismatisk och med en stor framtidstro. Fadern är en framgångsrik företagare, modern älskar antikviteter, och de har fyra till synes lyckade barn – tre söner och en dotter, Marianne.
​Romanen skildrar familjens liv från 1955 fram till 1993, men fokus ligger på hur deras tillvaro raseras efter en traumatisk händelse: dottern Marianne blir våldtagen på en fest. Denna katastrof fungerar som en vändpunkt som förändrar villkoren för alla i familjen.
​Boken utforskar familjens gradvisa sönderfall, hur de hanterar skam, skuld och förlust show more av respekt i samhället, samt hur de olika familjemedlemmarna förhåller sig till händelsen och varandra, särskilt i relation till faderns reaktion och Marannes svåra situation. Det är en berättelse om hur bräcklig även den lyckligaste familj kan vara och den skildrar en amerikansk familj i sönderfall. : Älskar Joyce Carol Oates hon skapar en stämning i böcker och hennes beskrivningar är så målande att det känns som man är mitt inne i berättelsen. Att få ta del i hur familjen Mulvaneys krossades var en smärtsam läsning. Personskildringar och även miljöbeskrivningar är som vanligt utöver. Jag tycker inte att boken var för lång , varje ord var viktig och en del av något större. Mulvaneys är en stor och bullrig familj som bor på en stor gård med många djur där alla djuren har namn och är en del av familjen. Det är en typisk amerikansk medelklass på en liten ort där alla känner alla. Familjen har byggt upp sitt rykte som en hårt arbetande familj.
Men allt förändras plötsligt när deras populära dottern går på bal och där händer det något. Joyce Carol Oates skildrar en familj fall, hur allt det de har byggt upp raseras på grund av att pojken Marianne träffar på balen tillhör än mäktigare familj

Handling & Tema : 4/5
Karaktärerna: 5/5
Miljöbeskrivning: 5/5
Språk & berättar konst 5/5 show less

SPOILER ALERT!

This novel mad me angry on so many levels, but angry most at mom and pop Mulvaney. Michael Mulvaney, Sr. did more damage to his daughter, Marianne, than her physical abuser ever did. A lifetime of emotional abuse because his frail male ego couldn't handle supporting his daughter! And mom, Corrine, was complicit in all of it! I found myself wanting to scream at them both, and shake some sense into Marianne. I was also left pondering how Marianne's strong sense of faith and morality was not only what stopped her from receiving justice ("I can't bear false witness") but, ultimately, is also what helped her move beyond the pain of the incident and her exile from the family. That being said, I just couldn't shake the feeling show more that Marianne just got f-ed over by everyone - her abuser, her family, and society in general.

This is a book worth reading. show less

'1976 when everything came apart for us and was never again put together in quite the same way', 14 Jan. 2013
By
sally tarbox

This review is from: We Were the Mulvaneys (Paperback)
Wonderful book, that starts off with the perfect American family: cheerleader daughter, sportsman eldest son, genius middle son...and the youngest, Judd, who narrates much of it. Loving mother, father who's 'made it' in business and socially....
And then Marianne is raped by a local boy. The whole story is on how this throws their whole lives out of kilter, breaks up the family, sends certain members on a downward spiral.
I thought the character of Patrick (the intellectual one) was BRILLIANTLY drawn; I understood his thinking as he embarked on an unexpected show more course of action. That's the great thing with Oates' writing- you may disapprove of her characters' actions, but you fully understand their thinking and motivation for what they do.
I couldn't put it down...it's the third one of her books that I've read and I think the best. show less

This book is hauntingly familiar to Dreiser's "An American Tragedy." Four children, their parents and a marriage are all sacrificed on the pyre of the parents' self-perceived image in the community. Joyce Carol Oates is an author who is powerful enough to make us feel their initial disbelief and subsequent pain following the "incident." I found Michael Sr. to be the most dislikeable character because he used the rape of his daughter to justify his own despicable behavior when he was needed the most and I found the daughter to be the one most deserving of our compassion. This is a book that will make its readers take a good, hard look at the depth of their own meaningful relationships to see if they would survive a devastation of the show more magnitude suffered by the Mulvaneys. This book is about people who prefer to maintain appearances at all cost and the cost is, indeed, very dear. show less