I read that last run-on sentence four times before comprehending it. And in the same paragraph (!) we get: A father denies his favourite child, and the devout mother unquestioningly goes along with it; the other children react by leaving or messing up; careers and ambitions are thwarted; a plan to execute retribution is hatched, further dividing the family; and, as lives are ruined or put on hold and the scars of the past refuse to heal, nobody talks about “it” – the unmentionable “event.” En casi 600 páginas escritas sin prisa, demorándose en las descripciones de personas y ambientes, entramos en la vida de la familia Mulvaney – padre, madre, 3 hijos y una hija – con su vida idílica en la granja de High Point cerca de la pequeña población de Mt. Ephraim. El padre tiene un negocio y una posición social reconocida en la comunidad, para él es muy importante ser aceptado en el Country Club y otras asociaciones y ser respetado por las fuerzas vivas de la localidad. Su mujer, Corinne, es un personaje muy inusual, dedicada a su familia y a su pequeño negocio de antigüedades, con un punto de locura y excentricidad que no le impide ser una madre atenta y cariñosa. Los hijos son populares en la escuela y todo marcha sobre ruedas hasta que se produce un incidente de abusos que cambiará sus vidas para siempre. During these mad dashes to the wall phone in the kitchen she hadn’t time to fall but with fantastical grace and dexterity wrenched herself upright in midfall and continued running (dogs whimpering, yapping hysterically in her wake, cats scattering wide-eyed and plume-tailed) before the telephone ceased its querulous ringing – though frequently she was greeted with nothing more than a derisive dial tone, in any case. The last part of the book and the ending was very bittersweet. As much as you want to be happy you can't help feeling something is just not letting you achieve that. It's probably the same thing the Mulvaneys are feeling by the end. Somehow we've become the Mulvaneys by just a few chapters into the book, so truly whatever they're feeling, you're now feeling. That just got you all the more involved in the book, because of course you want to know everything that happens and why. It also makes the book that much harder to put down.

Mom cried, cried.I’’ve never seen this construction of a sentence before, the leaving out of the word “and” where it would normally go. Maybe Oates does this all the time, maybe it’s a patented quirk of her writing, I wouldn’t know because I’ve never read anything else by her. (Soon to be corrected I hope.)

Not all the prose is so insightful. This passage, for instance, cries out for tightening and clarity: Writing makes Oates melancholy, especially towards the end of a book, when the momentum propels her through 10-hour days. She needs to surround herself with people to relax. So it was that, in spite of disliking most television and finding popular culture "debased", Oates took to Oprah's Book Club in a way some of her younger, more modish literary peers did not. In Oprah's world, readers don't read; they stay up all night sobbing their way through a book and then write to its author in the morning. "I found that very wonderful and very surprising," says Oates, blinking her great marble eyes. "Since I'm a literary person, I look upon books as texts that have been imagined and written. But the general reading public looks upon books as documents of reality, and so the people on Oprah would say, for instance, 'I have a mother just like that.' Or, 'My father was just like that.' Or, 'This happened to me.' They don't seem to perceive - nor do they wish to perceive - that this is a novel. I think if they had, for instance, a class on Shakespeare's Hamlet, they would say, 'Gertrude is just like my mother; Hamlet's like my brother; Ophelia, that's my story.' And they would get a lot of emotion out of that." She falters. There is nothing wrong with reading as therapy, but there is something perhaps painful to an author in seeing readers gobble up their books as an excuse to "basically talk about themselves". Oates's eyelashes lower. "Of course, one doesn't want to dampen that enthusiasm."

In 1978, Oates moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where she continues to teach in Princeton University’s creative writing program; she and her husband also operate a small press and publish a literary magazine, The Ontario Review. Shortly after arriving in Princeton, Oates began writing Bellefleur, the first in a series of ambitious Gothic novels that simultaneously reworked established literary genres and reimagined large swaths of American history. Published in the early 1980s, these novels marked a departure from the psychological realism of her earlier work. But Oates returned powerfully to the realistic mode with ambitious family chronicles (You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart), novels of female experience (Solstice, Marya: A Life), and even a series of pseudonymous suspense novels (published under the name “Rosamond Smith”) that again represented a playful experiment with literary genre. As novelist John Barth once remarked, “Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map.” In 2000, Oates was a National Book Award finalist in fiction for Blonde, an ambitious and imaginative portrait of one of America’s greatest cultural icons, Marilyn Monroe.

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Dopo che me ne sono andato quel giorno, quella domenica di Pasqua, ricordi? Mi sono svuotato. Il veleno che avevo nel sangue è colato fuori. Come fossi stato malato, infetto, e non me ne fossi accorto finché il veleno è scomparso. Però non rimpiango nulla. Penso che la vendetta debba essere bella. I greci lo sapevano. Sangue chiama sangue. Credo che l’istinto della “giustizia” sia innato, presente nei nostri geni. Il bisogno di ristabilire l’equilibrio.» Michael Sr. goes to the Mt. Ephraim Country Club one afternoon and notices a group of his former friends sitting together, laughing. Drunk, he pours a glass of beer on the head of a district judge, which leads to his arrest for assault and a newspaper article about the incident. The results are further erosion in Mulvaney Roofing and more attorney bills. We Were the Mulvaneys is a novel written by Joyce Carol Oates, and was published in 1996. We Were the Mulvaneys was featured in Oprah's Book Club in January 2001. In conclusion, summarize your reading experience with We Were the Mulvaneys. What grade would you give this novel?