Expensive People

In EXPENSIVE PEOPLE, the author, Joyce Carol Oates, takes us deep into the bowels of the troubled head of a child murderer – a murderer who happens to be a child – told on the point of view the murderer himself: Richard Everett. Oates used the memoir format to recount the events in Richard’s sometimes boring life in the almost perfectly depicted affluent suburbs that led to his premeditation of a murder, then to its materialization, then to its seemingly anticlimactic after effects, which did not actually ruin the genius of the novel.

For me, the novel has the same aftertaste as the films American Beauty (Sam Mendes) and Elephant (Gus van Sant), and the novel Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates).

This is my first Joyce Carol Oates and I’m impressed. I’m looking forward to reading some of her other works, particularly the other three which complete the so called Wonderland Quartet: them, A Garden of Earthly Delights and Wonderland.

{April 10, 2009}