Wonderland; a novel.byJoyce Carol Oates

Wonderland (1971) is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It is the final novel of The Wonderland Quartet, a series of four novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans.  It is also the first of the series of novels Oates wrote dealing with various professions, starting here with medicine. It would be followed by Do with Me What You Will (1973), on law; Assassins (1975), on politics; and Son of the Morning (1978), on religious vocations.

Spanning from the Great Depression to the turbulent Vietnam War era, Wonderland is the epic account of Jesse Vogel, a boy who emerged from a family tragedy with his life spared but his world torn apart. Orphaned after watching his father murder his entire family, Jesse embarks on a personal odyssey that takes him from a Dickensian foster home to college and graduate school to the pinnacle of the medical profession. As an adult, Jesse must summon the strength to reach across the “generation gap” and rescue his endangered teenaged daughter, who has fallen into the drug-infused 1960s counterculture.

A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), and them (1969) are first three books of The Wonderland Quartet.

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From the Dust Jacket - by Celestial Timepiece
Jesse Harte . . .
Jesse Vogel . . .
Jesse Pedersen . . .
Dr. Jesse Vogel . . .
Dr. Jesse Cady? . . .
Dr. Jesse Perrault? . . .

In so many guises—and in so many persons—does Jesse pursue the phantasmagoria of himself. Through boyhood shattered by murder, adolescence engulfed in science and mysticism, parenthood overwhelmed by the spiritual loss of his own child, WONDERLAND is the story of that land of wonder, the human "personality," the human soul.