We Were The Mulvaneys

The first book I ever recommended to a book club was We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates.  It was our group's first book, and I don't think the club ever forgave me.  We Were the Mulvaneys is a devastating experience, as tragic and painful to read as King Lear is to see.  The next five books we read were all comic novels, as if we had to purge Mulvaneys from our systems.  So, how can I recommend it?

Because as brutal as it is, Oates' novel is also ultimately redemptive - well, that may be too strong a word.  Maybe the word is forgiving, for the members of the cursed Mulvaney family - those who survive their long ordeal - are able to forgive, and go on as a family.

The plot is simple: An American family - imperfect, but happy - suffers an horrific event; the rape of their teenage daughter.  The rape is the catalyst of a series of actions that rips the family apart, tearing it along the fault lines that always existed, but that remained stable until the incalculable stress of the tragedy.

I'm not a fan of much of Oates' novels: Too often, her characters seem constructs, created to represent a moral position or philosophical concept.  But in the Mulvaneys, Oates creates some of the most vivid, real personalities in modern fiction.  Corinne and Mike are a living, breathing couple, and the disintegration of their marriage - of their love - is like watching a beautiful estate slide slowly over a cliff.

Anyone who has ever survived a family tragedy knows that things are never the same afterward; that the innocence of the years before the tragedy haunt you forever; and that somehow families, fractured and fragile, live on.  There is grace in this, although not an easy grace to accept.  Endurance is never rewarded with a return to paradise; at best, there is a return to some sort of peace, with the world and within the tribe.  We Were the Mulvaneys captures all the horror and grace of tragedy.  You'll never forget the Mulvaneys.