them
by Joyce Carol Oates
Summary
Loretta Botsford is sixteen on the first page, in a midwestern canal city in the 1930s, pretty and dreamy and certain something is about to begin, and it does: she wakes beside her first lover to find her brother has shot him in the bed. From that morning the novel follows Loretta for thirty years, through a policeman husband taken in panic, tenements, evictions and widowhood, and then divides itself between the two of her children who carry the book: Jules and Maureen Wendall.
Jules is the family's fire, a boy of enormous romantic will who wants out with a purity that keeps stranding him inside: odd jobs, petty crime, a rich suburban girl who runs off with him and destroys him at leisure, and always another return to Detroit with nothing. Maureen is the watcher, the good student who learns that money is the only membrane between her and her mother's life, and sets about accumulating an escape fund by the one means available, until her stepfather finds the money and beats her nearly out of her own mind; her long catatonic convalescence, and the icy deliberation with which she afterwards selects and takes another woman's husband, is the book's most frightening arc.
Everything converges on July 1967: the riot burns the Wendalls' street, Jules, adrift among radicals, crosses his final line, and Oates closes the family history inside the city's.
Around five hundred pages, naturalism at full pressure.
Best for readers who want the underside of the American midcentury, poverty as weather, told with a Victorian novel's patience and none of its mercy.
Historical Context & Significance
them won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1970, the capstone of an arrival unlike any other in American letters: Joyce Carol Oates was thirty one and this was the third novel of her Wonderland Quartet, written while she taught in Detroit through the years the book ends in. She framed it with an author's note presenting the story as grown from letters of a former student, a device readers took literally for years and Oates later described as part of the fiction, an early flare of her lifelong play with the authorship of suffering.
Critics read it as a bitter indictment of the American dream conducted at street level, Dreiser's method applied to the city that was then the country's industrial showcase and cautionary tale at once.
The career since has become its own legend, a novel or more a year for five decades, honors beyond counting, though the Pulitzer has repeatedly stopped at finalist and the Nobel remains the perennial rumor, but them remains the consensus centre of the early work and the book that made the scale of her ambition unmistakable.