Detailed item info | Synopsis | In upstate New York, the Mulvaneys are a wealthy and magnetic family--attractive, charismatic, promising. But after 25 years, the family begins to slide, then fragment, then shatter, and soon there is nothing left of the dynasty. Judd, the youngest of the clan, begins to search for the reasons behind the downfall, and as he uncovers family secrets, he begins to bring the Mulvaneys slowly back together in a spirit of healing and compassion.
| | Size | | Length: | 454 pages | | Height: | 9.0 in. | | Width: | 6.0 in. | | Thickness: | 1.2 in. | | Weight: | 16.8 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | The Mulvaneys, at first a close and very lucky family, drift apart over the years, until the youngest son, Judd, discovers the secret of their downfall and sets out to help reunite the family.
| | Industry reviews | "...[B]uilds on its biblical infrastructure (with a few nuts and bolts from Richardson's 'Clarissa') a world so richly observed and engagingly peopled that we're willing to sit still for yet another story of fall and redemption....Occasionally Ms. Oates's prose sounds canned and careless...but she gives us enough small luminous moments to carry several novels....'We Were the Mulvaneys' works not simply because of its meticulous details and gestures, or because 'family' is a hot-button issue these days, or because Ms. Oates has borrowed the primal narrative of Western culture to give her story subliminal oomph. Mere hard work and canny calculation could get a writer that far. What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is something stronger and spookier: her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something happening on the other side that we'd swear was life itself."
New York Times Book Review - David Gates (09/15/1996)
"...[I]t is hard to avoid the simple fact that, like anything we have in too great a number--late summer squash, back issues of the 'New Yorker'--Oates's books are easy to undervalue. It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate 'We Were the Mulvaneys'....Oates unspools this expansive story, and captures this memorable clan, with a huge amount of exacting yet unfussy energy. the busy spill of her sentences is a perfect match for the tumble of big-family life....[I]t will consume you."
Washington Post Book World - Dwight Garner (09/22/1996)
"Joyce Carol Oates is just a fearless writer. Where others tremble and falter, she plunges right in and does not look up or come to shore until the fullest telling of the tale, the most thorough examination of the direst possibilities, the most exacting testing of ordinary assumptions and theories, have been played out. 'We were the Mulvaneys' is yet new testimony to her great intelligence, certainly, but, more important, to her brave heart and her impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Beverly Lowry (09/15/1996)
"Just when you think Oates has finally run dry, or is mired in mechanical self-repetition, she stuns you with another example of her essential kinship with the classic American realistic novelists. Dreiser would have understood and approved the passion and power of 'We Were the Mulvaneys'."
Kirkus Reviews (07/15/1996)
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