Expensive people.byJoyce Carol Oates

Expensive People (1968) is the thrid novel by Joyce Carol Oates and the second of the Wonderland Quartet. It was nominated for National Book Award for Fiction.

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Product Desciption
Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In Expensive People, Oates takes a provocative and suspenseful look at the roiling secrets of America’s affluent suburbs. Set in the late 1960s, this first-person confession is narrated by Richard Everett, a precocious and obese boy who sees himself as a minor character in the alarming drama unfolding around him.

Fascinated by yet alienated from his attractive, self-absorbed parents and the privileged world they inhabit, Richard incisively analyzes his own mismanaged childhood, his pretentious private schooling, his “successful-executive” father, and his elusive mother. In an act of defiance and desperation, eleven-year-old Richard strikes out in a way that presages the violence of ever-younger Americans in the turbulent decades to come.

A National Book Award finalist, Expensive People is a stunning combination of social satire and gothic horror. “You cannot put this novel away after you have opened it,” said The Detroit News. “This is that kind of book–hypnotic, fascinating, and electrifying.”

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From the Dust Jacket
EXPENSIVE PEOPLE is a new fictional world for the award-winning novelist Joyce Carol Oates. Her characters are the affluent suburbanites in our morally bankrupt society. Crucified within that society, or so he feels, is the tremendously precocious son of suburbia's successful man and his frustrated wife—a child who, in a desperate attempt at freedom, murders. In this electrifying novel, Miss Oates carves out a tale of Gothic horror worthy of the critical acclaim that has been hers.

Miss Oates was a leading contender for the National Book Committee's fiction award and has just been honored by the National Institute of Arts and Letters as the recipient of the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award for her most recent novel, A Garden of Earthly Delights.