Expensive People

Excerpt

I was a child murderer.

I don't mean child-murderer, though that's an idea. I mean child murderer, that is, a murderer who happens to be a child, or a child who happens to be a murderer. You can take your choice. When Aristotle notes that man is a rational animal one strains forward, cupping his ear, to hear which of those words is emphasized—rational animal, rational animal? Which am I? Child murderer, child murderer? It took me years to start writing this memoir, but now that I'm started, now that those ugly words are typed out, I could keep on typing forever. A kind of quiet, blubbering hysteria has set in. You would be surprised, normal as you are, to learn how many years, how many months, and how many awful minutes it has taken me just to type that first line, which you read in less than a second: I was a child murderer.

You think it's easy?

Awards

• National Book Award finalist
• New York Times Notable Books of the Year

Note

Book 2 of The Wonderland Quartet

Reviews

• Publishers Weekly, August 12, 1968, p47
• Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 1968, p929
• Library Journal, October 15, 1968, p3800
• Saturday Review, October 26, 1968
• Time, November 1, 1968, p102
• New York Times Book Review, November 3, 1968, p5
• Washington Post Book World, November 3, 1968, p5
• Nation, November 4, 1968, p475
• Best Sellers, November 15, 1968, p335
• New York Times, December 7, 1968, p45
• New York Review of Books, January 2, 1969, p40-41
• Critic, February-March 1969, p83-85
• America, March 22, 1969, p340
• Antioch Review, Spring 1969, p109-110
• Yale Review, Spring 1969, p464+
• Hudson Review, Summer 1969, p324-325
• New Statesman, October 3, 1969, p467
• Observer, October 5, 1969, p34
• Listener, October 9, 1969, p493
  
• Times Literary Supplement, October 16, 1969, p1177
• Hudson Review, Spring 1972, p146-150
  

Other Editions

Afterword

Expensive People: The Confessions of a "Minor Character"

Expensive People, originally published in 1968, was imagined as the second of an informal, thematically (but not literally) integrated trilogy of novels written in the 1960's, the first and third being A Garden of Earthly Delights (1966) and them (1969). These novels, differing considerably in subject matter, language, and tone, have in common the use of a youthful protagonist in his or her quintessentially American adventures; they were conceived by the author as critiques of America—American culture, American values, American dreams—as well as narratives in which romantic ambitions are confronted by what must be called "reality."

Appearing in the fall of 1968, Expensive People, with its climactic episode of self-destructive violence, was perceived as an expression of the radical discontent, the despair, the bewilderment and outrage of a generation of young and idealistic Americans confronted by an America of their elders so steeped in political hypocrisy and cynicism as to seem virtually irremediable except by the most extreme means. What is assassination but a gesture of political impotence?—what are most "crimes of passion" except gestures of self-destruction, self-annihilation? When the child murderer of Expensive People realizes that he has become, or has been, in fact, all along, a mere "Minor Character" in his mother's life, he is made to realize absolute impotence; inconsequence; despair. He has slipped forever "out of focus." A desperate act of (premeditated) matricide will not restore his soul to him but will at least remove the living object of his love and grief.

A complex, multi-tiered novel can be an exercise in architectural design and it can be, in the writing, true labor; a novel like Expensive People with its relaxed first-person narration, its characteristically succinct and chatty chapters, and its direct guidance of the reader's reading experience, can ride upon the ease of its own melting, as Robert Frost said of the Iyric poem. Of my numerous novels Expensive People glimmers in my memory as the most fluidly written in its first-draft version; my precise memories of writing it, giving voice to the doomed Richard Everett in long unbroken mildly fevered sessions, are tied to the upstairs, rear study of the first of the several houses of my married life, a brick colonial, modest, with four bedrooms, at 2500 Woodstock Drive, Detroit, Michigan. (What happy days: at the time I was an instructor in English at the University of Detroit where I taught, with unflagging enthusiasm and a boundless energy that perplexes me today, four courses including two generously populated sections of "Expository Writing"—freshman composition.)

The "I" of my protagonist Richard became so readily the "eye" of the novelist that, at times, the barrier between us dissolved completely and the voice in which I wrote was, if not strictly speaking my own, an only slightly exaggerated approximation of my own. (The most immediate model for the novel's peculiar tone was evidently Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler: or, The Life of Jack Wilton, 1594, often called "the first novel in English"; my narrator alludes to "that other unfortunate traveler from whom I have stolen so much" in Part I, Chapter 23, but in rereading the ebullient sixteenth-century work I can see only occasional and glancing similarities.) The fluid writing experience of Expensive People would have been impossible if I had not worked from an earlier first-person "confession" also narrated by a disturbed and self-destructive adolescent boy, in a more subdued, naturalistic key; this was a completed novel of about two hundred fifty pages with which I was dissatisfied, as an unworthy successor to A Garden of Earthly Delights, which yet had its hooks in my soul and could not be discarded. (With the completion of Expensive People, however, the manuscript was quickly and unsentimentally tossed away: no more than self-conscious Richard Everett would I have wished to keep any evidence of early botched and faltering versions of my more "eloquent" self.)

What a powerful hold the world of "expensive people" had upon me in those years! The short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Marriages & Infidelities (1972) focus upon similar themes, frequently from the perspective of estranged and hyperesthesiac adolescents like the protagonists of "Boy and Girl," "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction, and Began My Life Over Again," "Stalking," "Stray Children," "Problems of Adjustment in Survivors of Natural/ Unnatural Disasters," and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" The novella Cybele (1979) most clearly resembles Expensive People—it is set in precisely the identical suburban-Detroit world—but its tone is far more pitiless and unyielding than Richard Everett's; the voice is that of the ancient goddess Cybele mockingly recounting the rake's-progress misadventures of one of her doomed mortal lovers.

Normal men and women—by whom I mean, I suppose, non-novelists—may be surprised to learn that novelists are haunted by a quickened sense of mortality when they are writing novels; the terror of dying before the work is completed, the interior vision made exterior, holds us in its grip. Once the work is completed, however, once transformed into a book, an object, to be held in the hand, the novelist does permit himself or herself to feel a modicum of accomplishment: not pride so much as simple relief. Here it is. Now I can die. Rereading a novel after many years is thus a disorienting experience. For while there does remain the original, however unmerited satisfaction of the achievement in itself, there now arises, unexpectedly, a sense of profound and irrevocable loss.

The novel has become, in the intervening years, a species of "look-back" time, to use the poetic astrophysical term; it has, for all its immediacy to others' eyes, a fossil-image glimmer for the writer. Behind many of the proper names of Expensive People ("Fernwood," "Johns Behemoth," "Epping Way," "Bebe Hofstadter," "Mr. Body" even "Spark," et al.), as behind a scrim, there exist authentic names, and authentic entities; the descriptive scenes bear witness to a greedily appropriated authentic landscape, that of Birmingham/Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; at every interstice, in virtually every turn of phrase, use of metaphor, literary allusion (to, for instance, Nada's note to herself, to revise "Death and the Maiden" and change its title—which title, changed, will be "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"), literary parody, and aside, I am forcibly reminded not only of my old long-forgotten sources but of my former, now lost self in the act of writing: inventing. Yet more painfully I am reminded of the losses of dear friends and acquaintances of that crowded era of my life more than two decades ago; and of the era itself, so tumultuous in our American history and so crucial in our fractured sense of our national identity. My romance with Detroit, I've characterized this phase of my life. My romance with novel-writing itself.

So the vertigo of memory haunts me in rereading Expensive People. Did expensive houses sell for as little as $80,500 in those years? Comedy ends abruptly with death and since so many of my "expensive people" have indeed died, including the exemplary woman to whom Expensive People was dedicated, isn't the jocular tone of the narrator inappropriate? Isn't it. . . too unknowing? too young? Even the novel's thinly codified secret (having to do with the execution of an ambitious woman writer as fit punishment for having gone beyond the "limits of her world"— upstate New York) strikes me as sobering and not, as I'd surely intended, blackly comic. I recall too that the shooting of a woman by her son was based upon an actual incident of that era, but I can't recall any of the details of that case, nor even if I made any effort to seek them out. For the writer, emblematic material is most highly charged when it is only glancingly and obliquely suggested; once the idea presents itself, our instinct is to turn discreetly away. Sometimes even to shade our eyes.

Most of Expensive People is fiction, of course. An invented tapestry of "observed" data stretched upon a structure of parable-like simplicity. I saw myself then, as I see myself now, as a perennially romantic traveler, an "eye" enraptured by the very jumble and clamor of America. Richard Everett is speaking of his parents but he may well be speaking of all the inhabitants of his world when he confesses, "Yes, I loved them."

JOYCE CAROL OATES
January, 1990