Them Paperback - 2006

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From the jacket flap

Winner of the National Book Award and in print for more than thirty years, them ranks as one of the most masterly portraits of postwar America ever written by a novelist. Including several new pages and text substantially revised and updated by the author, this Modern Library edition is the most current and accurate version available of Oates' seminal work.
A novel about class, race, and the horrific, glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums. Loretta, beautiful and dreamy and full of regret by age sixteen, and her two children, Maureen and Jules, make up Oates' vision of the American fam-ily--broken, marginal, and romantically proud. The novel's title, pointedly uncapitalized, refers to those Americans who inhabit the outskirts of society--men and women, mothers and children--whose lives many authors in the 1960s had left unexamined. Alfred Kazin called her subject "the sheer rich chaos of American life." The Nation wrote, "When Miss Oates' potent, life-gripping imagination and her skill at narrative are conjoined, as they are preeminently in them, she is a prodigious writer." In addition to the text revisions, this--new edition contains an Afterword by the author and a new Introduction by Greg Johnson, Oates' biographer and the author of two monographs on the work of Joyce Carol Oates.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt

Children of Silence


One warm evening in August 1937 a girl in love stood before a mirror.

Her name was Loretta. It was her reflection in the mirror she loved, and out of this dreamy, pleasing love there arose a sense of excitement that was restless and blind--which way would it move, what would happen? Her name was Loretta; she was pleased with that name too, though Loretta Botsford pleased her less. Her last name dragged down on her, it had no melody. She stood squinting into the plastic-rimmed mirror on her bureau, trying to get the best of the light, seeing inside her high-colored, healthy, ordinary prettiness a hint of something daring and dangerous. Looking into the mirror was like looking into the future; everything was there, waiting. It was not just that face she loved. She loved other things. During the week she worked at Ajax Laundry and Dry Cleaners, and she was very lucky to have that job, and during the week the steamy, rushed languor of her work built up in her a sense of excitement. What was going to happen? Today was Saturday.

Her face was full, and there was a slight mischievous puffiness about her cheeks that made her look younger than she was--she was sixteen--and her eyes were blue, a mindless, bland blue, not very sharp. Her lips were painted a deep scarlet, exactly the style of the day. Her eyebrows were plucked in exactly the style of the day. Did she not dream over the Sunday supplement features, and did she not linger on her way to work before the Trinity Theater in order to stare at the pictures? She wore a navy-blue dress pulled in tight at the waist. Her waist was surprisingly narrow, her shoulders a little broad, almost masculine; she was a strong girl. Upon her competent shoulders sat this fluttery, dreamy head, blond hair puffed out and falling down in coquettish curls past her ears, past her collar, down onto her back, so that when she ran along the sidewalk it blew out behind her and men stopped to stare at her; never did she bother to glance back at these men--they were like men in movies who do not appear in the foreground but only focus interest, show which way interest should be directed. She was in love with the thought of this. Behind her good clear skin was a universe of skin, all of it healthy. She loved this, she was in love with the fact of girls like her having come into existence, though she could not have expressed her feelings exactly. She said to her friend Rita, "Sometimes I feel so happy over nothing I must be crazy." Dragging around in the morning, trying to get her father up and trying to get her brother Brock fed and out before somebody started a fight, still she felt a peculiar sense of joy, of prickly excitement, that nothing could beat down. What was going to happen? "Oh, you're not crazy," Rita said thoughtfully, "you just haven't been through it yet."

She combed her hair with a heavy pink brush. It worried her to see her curls so listless--that was because of the heat. From the apartment across the way, through the open window, she could hear a radio playing music that meant Saturday night, and her heart began to pound with anticipation of the long hours ahead during which anything might happen. Her father, who had been out of work for almost ten years, liked to lie in bed and drink and smoke, not caring that so many hours rushed by he'd never be able to get back--but Loretta felt that time was passing too quickly. It made her nervous. She scratched at her bare arm with the brush in a gentle, unconscious, caressing gesture, and felt the dreaminess of the late summer afternoon rise in her. In the kitchen someone sat down heavily, as if answering her, in response to her wondering.

"Hey, Loretta!" Brock called.
"Yeah, I'm coming." Her voice came out harsh and sounded of the dry cleaners and the street, but it was not her true voice; her true voice was husky and feminine.

She prepared supper for Brock. The kitchen was narrow, and he had to sit right in her way, so that she made a face and said, "Excuse me," ironically, squeezing past. Brock was dressed for Saturday night too. He wore a blue serge coat over gray trousers and a queer metallic bronze necktie. A necktie! It was part of Brock's batty style. He had turned twenty a few weeks before, which seemed to Loretta almost old; and on his pinched face an expression of premature cunning seemed to have frozen, as in a movie still. Like Loretta, he had blond hair, but it seemed to be darkening; he rarely washed it, maybe once a month--it was stiff with grease. He had a strong, angular face with prominent cheekbones. This had been their mother's face. Strange how, since their mother's death some years before, Loretta had begun to notice her sometimes in Brock's face. And in his sudden, impulsive bursts of rage--Brock was always incensed by the old man and certain noisy neighbors--she could see her mother's restless agitation; it was disturbing.

"Jesus Christ, is that perfume you're wearing?" Brock screwed up his face like a clown.
"Go to hell. You're not funny."
Brock laughed, meanly.

Loretta took a bowl of potatoes out of the icebox and put them into a frying pan; she had peeled them earlier. The grease sizzled and spat up at her. She resented cooking for her brother yet there was a strange pleasure in it. I do this. This is what I do. Brock liked her waiting on him, she knew. Sitting there at the end of the table so self-importantly, like the malicious spitting of grease: she had only to glance at his amused eyes to see how hateful he was.

"Look, what the hell is eating you?" Loretta cried.
Brock smiled innocently. "Is the old man back yet?"
"You know he isn't."
"How do I know? I've got X-ray eyes?"
"He went out this morning with that Cole to look at some vacant lot. Oh, I know it's crazy--don't look at me."
"What vacant lot? He's going to buy a vacant lot?"
"Ask him."
"With what? Where's the money? What's he going to buy it with?"
Brock was getting excited. Saliva shone on his lips.
"Brock, forget it! Pa isn't hurting anyone."
"He's sick. He should be carted away."
"Carted away where?"
"Should be locked up."

Brock leaned forward on his elbows and spoke in his rapid, insinuating voice, as if he meant something other than his words, and you were a fool not to catch on. Oh, he was hateful! He was Loretta's brother and in the years of their childhood he had done well by her--he'd fought with older kids who teased her, following the rule of the street, but that was maybe for his own honor, not her. At one time no one could have guessed that Brock Botsford, the long-limbed stooping kid with the blue-eyed stare and quick fists, would grow so much apart from the other boys, precocious, yet in a way stunted, into this strange, mock-serious old-young man. Beneath his sly words and his facial mannerisms, a perverse and malicious will. Loretta dreaded her girl friends talking with Brock, attracted by his cheap flashy clothes and movie-style, then edging away, nervously giggling, "Isn't that guy queer?" In that way that girls do, with absolute accuracy.

"Oh, you talk too much sometimes! Get a job yourself, a good job, if you think you're superior to him," Loretta said, incensed.


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

Praise for The Wonderland Quartet, four early novels by Joyce Carol Oates

A Garden of Earthly Delights
Expensive People
them
Wonderland

"Protean and prodigious are surely the words that describe Ms. Oates. From the very beginning, as these impressive and diverse novels make clear, her talents and interests and strengths have never found comfort in restraint. She's sought, instead, to do it all -- to face and brilliantly, inventively transact and give shape to as much of experience as possible, as if by no other means is a useful and persuasive gesture of moral imagination even conceivable. For us readers these are valuable books." -- Richard Ford

"These four novels reveal Oates' powers of observation and invention, her meticulous social documentation joined to her genius for forging unforgettable myths. She is one of the handful of great American novelists of the last hundred years. " -- Edmund White
"This rich, kaleidoscopic suite of novels displays the young Joyce Carol Oates exercising her formidable artistic powers to portray a turbulent twentieth-century America. They offer the reader a singular opportunity to experience some of Oates's best writing and to witness her development, novel by novel, into one of our finest contemporary writers." --Greg Johnson, author of Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates
"As a young writer, Joyce Carol Oates published four remarkable novels, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), them (1969), and Wonderland (1971). They were all nominated for the National Book Award, and Oates won the award for them in 1970....Reprinting the series in modern paperback editions nearly forty years after their composition allows us a new perspective on their collective meaning and illuminates their place in Oates's overall career...The Wonderland Quartet, written in the "white heat" of youthful imagination and fervor, remains not only relevant but prophetic about the widening social and economic gulf in American society, the self-destructive violence of political extremism, and the terrifying hubris of science and technology. Bringing to life an unforgettable range of men and women, the Wonderland Quartet offers a compelling introduction to a protean and prodigious contemporary artist." -- Elaine Showalter, from her introduction, which appears in all four of these new Modern Library editions

Praise for them
"A superbly accomplished vision."-John Leonard, The New York Times

"That rarity in American fiction, a writer who seems to grow with each new book."-Time Magazine

"A superb storyteller. For sheer readability, Them is unsurpassed."-Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"When Miss Oates' potent, life-gripping imagination and her skill at narrative are conjoined, as they are pre-eminently in Them, she is a prodigious writer."-The Nation

Praise for Joyce Carol Oates
"If the phrase 'woman of letters' existed, she would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it."
–John Updike, The New Yorker

“Oates writes prose of striking directness and simplicity. . . . She invests everything she touches with the qualities of her own voice, which is nervous, fast, febrile and hot as an iron. I’d unhesitatingly say that she is one of the most important living American writers.” –Peter Straub, New Statesman

“Oates’s novels work best when the action is set off by one terrible mistake. . . . These novels are hypnotically propulsive, written in the key of What the Hell is Going to Happen Next? Oates pairs big ideas with small details in an ideal fictional balancing act, but the nice thing is that you don’t really notice. You’re too busy rushing on to the next page.”
–Claire Dederer, The New York Times

“Joyce Carol Oates is a superb writer with a perfect eye and ear. She has the uncanny ability to give us a cinemascopic vision of her America.”
–Charles Shapiro, National Review

“Oates is unlike many women writers in her feeling for the pressure, mass, density of violent American experience not known to the professional middle class. . . . [Her] characters seem to move through a world wholly physical in its detail, yet they touch us and frighten us like disembodied souls calling to us from another world.”
–Alfred Kazin, Harper’s

“To read Oates is to cross an emotional minefield, to be stunned to the soul by multiple explosions, but to emerge to safety again with the skull ringing with shocked revelation and clarity. . . . [Oates’s] lack of presumption, her superlative middle-American scope and focus (like a Dos Passos, a Zola or a Dostoevski), and her unerring dedication to curing the absence of empathy that pervades so much of our contemporary writing all combine to make her one of the top writers truly puzzling out the complexity of the American experience today.”
– S. K. Oberbeck, – The Washington Post Book World

“Perhaps the most significant novelist to have emerged in the United States in the last decade
. . . Like the most important modern writers–Joyce, Proust, Mann–she has an absolute identification with her material: the spirit of a society at a crucial point in its history.”
–Newsweek