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.