We Were the Mulvaneys (or were we?)

You might wonder why the Dayton library with its limited space owns two copies of Joyce Carol Oates's 1996 Oprah's Book Club selection We Were the Mulvaneys. I don't have an answer to that one, but it's certainly worth being checked out by two people at the same time. Like so much of Oates's best work, We Were the Mulvaneys combines dirty realism (we learn exactly when Burger King and Wendy's move into the tiny town of Mt. Ephraim, New York) with a gothic sensibility (a pivotal scene involves near death by quicksand). It's 454 pages, but I read it in one night.

The plot begins in 1976 with the Mulvaneys--eccentric but responsible parents and four promising children. A few chapters in (and I'm not really giving away everything here--the back cover provides plenty of hints), Marianne, a high school junior, is violently date-raped, and everything goes wrong from there for the whole family. While reading, I often asked myself whose fault it was that the family deteriorated so quickly. The rape is the rapist's fault, of course, and there's evidence in the novel that Marianne is not his only victim. The people of the town are all pretty bad, inexplicably--or maybe not so inexplicably--taking the side of the rapist's well-heeled family over the Mulvaneys. Marianne joins a cult. Revenge is plotted and taken. There were times when I thought, Will this family never get on with its life?

Over the next 15 years, the father behaves very badly, and his life spirals downward more dramatically than anyone else's. At one point one of the sons, a Marine, seems to be on the verge of pouring his heart out to his father about his difficulties adjusting to civilian life. The father is so drunk that he can barely remember the son's name, and the moment passes. I kept asking, Would the father have reached this point anyway if the rape hadn't happened? Or would he have continued with his happy and prosperous life? And later, Is the family heartless or merely practical in moving on with their lives without him?

I'm glad that at the end of the novel, as the back-cover copy suggests, a "miracle" has happened that will "allow the family to bridge the chasms" and "reunite in the spirit of love and healing." I still get the feeling that all of the family members have been stunted in a way that wouldn't have happened had the rape never occurred. But certainly in the case of this family, the bond they've finally rebuilt with each other is a whole lot better than the alternative.

‘Moby Dick’ by Herman Melville

Obviously, Moby Dick is a great American novel. The obsessed captain Ahab has sworn vengeance on the infamous whale Moby Dick. As many already known from the first line of the book, Ishmael tells the story of the best known whaling voyage of all time (albeit a fictional voyage) from the viewpoint of a member of the ship’s crew.

So many people, including many English majors that I have known, haven’t been able to push themselves through Moby Dick, and understandably so. It is a dense and complex book that few feel compelled to read if they aren’t assigned to do so by a professor. I won’t deny that the book is difficult, or imply that I fully comprehend every obscure reference that Melville has made, but on the whole, I’m glad to be familiar with the book. In truth, I may have benefitted from the graphic descriptions of the processes of whaling more than the narrative, and my final opinion of the novel may be that the work is of greater importance as a historical reference than entertainment fiction. Of course, I grew up playing the ‘Save the Whales’ board game, so it’s hard to imagine how Melville would feel about my perspective.

Even though the reader grows attached to some of the characters on the ship, I think my final sympathy lies with Moby Dick. The sailors think of him as a ruthless beast, but he is really just famous for preventing people from murdering him. I don’t think I’d mind having a reputation for not letting people kill me either.