Al mismo tiempo que valora la familia, también es crítica con todo los aspectos negativos que puede comportar: The author also has an annoying habit of repeating phrases in italics, supposedly to suggest subconscious thoughts but too often feeling like a lazy shorthand saying, “Look, look, this is significant!” It's the way families are, sometimes. A thing goes wrong and no-one knows how to fix it and years pass and - no-one knows how to fix it. Animals are at the heart of the Mulvaney family —they not only love their cats, dogs, birds, and horses, they love each other and communicate with each other through their animals. Is this a family strength, or does it reveal something skewed in the family emotional dynamic? Have they in a sense glorified their animals by playing up their “cuddly” loving qualities and overlooking their darker instincts? Does their connection with the animals change after Marianne is raped?

There were those times when the telephone rang, and she could not locate a phone amid the clutter. She rushed, she stumbled – for what if it was Michael Sr., her beloved husband of whom she thought, worried obsessively as the mother of an infant if physically parted from the infant thinks and worries obsessively of the infant even when her mind appears to be fully engaged, if not obsessed, with other matters. Sus sonrisas eran monedas de oro distribuidas descuidadamente en los corredores de la escuela, sus saludos – ‘Hola’ y ‘Qué tal!’ y ‘Cómo estás’ – eran melódicos como los gritos de las aves primaverales.A veces, las familias son así. Una cosa va mal y nadie sabe como arreglarla y pasan los años y...nadie sabe como arreglarlo".

Success came early: while attending Syracuse University on scholarship, she won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest. After graduating as valedictorian, she earned an M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin, where she met and married Raymond J. Smith after a three-month courtship; in 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, a city whose erupting social tensions suggested to Oates a microcosm of the violent American reality. Her finest early novel, them, along with a steady stream of other novels and short stories, grew out of her Detroit experience. “Detroit, my ‘great’ subject,” she has written, “made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am —for better or worse.” It was just too much for me to believe the dad's unexplained refusal to have anything to do with his daughter after the rape, and the mom's role in casting the daughter out into the world on dad's behalf, as if the rape was their daughter's fault. I didn't get any indication (despite how much Oates seems to go on and on and on) that the parents believed their daughter was not credible or that she was "asking for" the rape, no matter how illogical such a belief would be. The Mulvaney family's idyllic life on their farm is characterized by innocence and unity. However, a tragic event disrupts this innocence, sending ripples through the family's dynamics. The theme of innocence is central as the characters grapple with the loss of their innocence and the unraveling of their tightly-knit relationships.

Themes of Innocence and Loss

If Marianne’s rape happened today instead of in the mid-1970s, would the impact on the family and on her life have been very different? What if the Mulvaney?s lived in a big city instead of in a small town —would the rape have a different “meaning”?

Ms. Oates, who is childless, dedicates her novel to "my" Mulvaneys. But you don't need to have a large family to appreciate this emotionally charged story. For Joyce Carol Oates is a truly gifted storyteller who artfully handles multi-charactered and multi-layered pieces of fiction. An extraordinary woman of letters, Ms. Oates has also authored twenty-one volumes of short stories and more than a dozen works of non-fiction. This, combined with her twenty-five previous novels, adds up to more than fifty books by a fifty-seven-year-old woman.

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I am ashamed to be seen reading anything baring the "Oprah's Book Club" stamp, but I must say that I am never truly deeply disappointed by the selections. (Some do manage to achieve classic status.) Until now. (Is this the very reason the club dismantled and lost the cred????) 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." The novel is so psychologically intricate – Oates documents all the little things, the minute failures in communication that build up until everything reaches the point of no return. I particularly enjoyed the description of how the family communicates through their pets in a way of avoiding having difficult conversations. The daughter’s only act of rebellion noted was this one time when she broke from this established form of communication and snapped at her mother. It was such a small thing, but it left ripples. As a person with an easy access to her store of anger and rage, I found the mother’s and daughter’s inability to get angry perplexing and frustrating, but possibly, understandable in its context.