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by: Joyce Carol Oates
List Price: $14.95Amazon.com's Price: $10.17 You Save: $4.78 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780345484406
ISBN: 0345484401
Label: Modern Library
Manufacturer: Modern Library
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 576
Publication Date: September 12, 2006
Publisher: Modern Library
Release Date: September 12, 2006
Sales Rank: 89294
Studio: Modern Library
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. As powerful and relevant today as it on its initial publication, them chronicles the tumultuous lives of a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, from the 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her “potent, life-gripping imagination,” Oates traces the aspirations and struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who is filled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequent destinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight to survive in a world of violence and danger.
Winner of the National Book Award, them is an enthralling novel about love, class, race, and the inhumanity of urban life. It is, raves The New York Times, “a superbly accomplished vision.”
Them is the third novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Acute exposure of fragility beneath hard, shielding façades
Apathy is a weapon. Not speaking about their disappointments - as working class kids traditionally aren't supposed to do - made the victims of silence terribly alone and isolated. As Maureen and Jules grow up they learn to use apathy themselves as a weapon with which they can obliterate the outside world, disconnect themselves from all that makes the world ugly and incomprehensible. Alienation nearly kills the Children of Silence when they're forced to conform and to submit to performing tedious, ... Read More
Rating: - Realism stretched like putty
Perhaps the greatest trick which Oates performs in Them is her ability to take emotions which human beings have been examining for centuries, like love, and pull them apart, elongate them to such an extent that they are barely recognizable from their pedestrian definitions. There is an excruciating, unrelenting quality to Them, and it is found in this inscrutable ability to take the banal and make it rich, painful, grotesque. This novel of great pain laid bare is not so much an exercise in exposing ... Read More
Rating: - The only kind of fiction that is real
As writer Joyce Carol Oates states in the introduction of her "them", this book is `the only kind of fiction that is real'. The gimmick in this book is that she tells the story as if it were reality. According to her early note, the narrative is based on some letters she received from a former student. This so-called student wasn't a good writer, but she thought her story worthy telling therefore her teacher assumed the task.
The student is Maureen Wendal, one of `them'. The narrative is ... Read More
Rating: - Possibly The Novel Upon Which Oates Built Her Reputation
Jules, Loretta, and Maureen Wendall are three of the most tormented and tormenting characters from modern American literature. These people, even Loretta but especially Maureen, have the capacity to advance themselves beyond their lower-class roots, yet each allows himself or herself to be doomed not just by the turmoil of events outside their lives, but by the limitations of their own personalities.
When Oates composed this aggressively frustrating novel some forty years ago, the material ... Read More
Rating:  - Great Writing, so-so story
To read this book is a pure pleasure. The writing is amazing, descriptive but not so much that your imagination is constricted. The characters are so complex and well developed, it makes reading along with them realistic and enjoyable. However, this is one of those "good" books with a depressing plot. That's how I would describe it, depressing. Over the course of the book things just keep getting worse, and at the very end - well, I won't give anything away. If you're the type of person who likes to ... Read More
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