EXPENSIVE PEOPLE: Amazon.ca: Joyce Carol Oates: Books

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Product Description

Book Description

Oates's third novel, originally published in 1968, is the riveting story of a child murderer told by the killer himself. With a new afterword by the author. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt

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Customer Reviews

6 Reviews

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Average Customer Review

4.5 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars one of the finest American novels, Jun 11 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Expensive People (Paperback)

Darkly funny, richly allusive, Oates' satire of the upper middle class is a wonderful read. Many Nabokovian resonances.

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4.0 out of 5 stars A flawed but engaging early work by the prolific Oates, Sep 3 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Expensive People (Paperback)

Joyce Carol Oates must be one of the most prolific contemporary novelists of our time. Her taste for torrid themes, in particular the brutal and bizarre, are well known. "Expensive People", one of her early works, starts off with a bang. A more direct opening you'll not find. The scene is set. You're instantly captivated and as she reels you in, you succumb and immediately find yourself in Richard Everett's head as he unveils his life story to you...bit by bit. You know you're dealing with dysfunctionality as soon as you meet his parents. There's a seething madness underneath just waiting to get out. If the medium were film, you'll see them cast in grainy black and white. But it isn't. Sad to say, the book loses momentum midway and it becomes tedious. You keep waiting for something to happen and when it does, it's anticlimactic. In the words of Richard, life isn't fiction. Nor is it half as dramatic. Oates is a colourful and engaging writer. She's got craft but has a tendency to indulge herself and when she does, she loses focus. "Expensive People" isn't a conventional thriller. It's a social critique of American society at the turn of the 60s decade and about the falseness of respectable society on the brink of a social revolution that will forever shatter time tested norms. While flawed and not entirely satisfying, it's an impressive early work and Oates got much better by the time she wrote Black Water.

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5.0 out of 5 stars surrealism of suburbia, April 11 2000

By	J Goldman (Crested Butte, CO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Expensive People (Paperback)

Joyce Carol Oates writes a Nostradamus-like prediction in "Expensive People". She delves deeply and sympathetically into the mind of a maddened child, and what events and conditions have played upon this child to reduce him to his psychotic state.

Her description of suburbia are chillingly real, in the surrealism that they potray about our middle-America life and the saftey net of support that is purported. In the wake of the events at Columbine high school in Littleton, CO, "Expensive People" is a must read for all of our society to better understand ourselves, and our disenchanted teenagers.

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Most recent customer reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A highly enjoyable book
JCO takes us deep into the mind of a child killer -- that is a killer who just happens to be a chid. Read more

Published on Sep 29 1998

5.0 out of 5 stars Expensive People is hauntingly dark in its realism and truth
JCO, one of this country's most prolific writers, has written a book that takes what we read in the newspapers and see on the news, into the depths of the mind of how a possible... Read more

Published on Jun 2 1998 by Christian Engler

4.0 out of 5 stars Depressing but fascinating
I've always enjoyed Joyce Carol Oates' writing, and I thought I'd give one of her earlier works a try. Read more

Published on Jan 2 1998