Expensive People

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The New York Times Book Review:

  It is sheer cant (though speculative) that the product of a mad, feverish mind must be in itself mad and feverish, as if the mind, like Kant's kneecap, could bend only one way. This dogma seems possible only when the “voice” of the madman is so hysterical that it engulfs—one might say drowns out—the legitimate feverish voice of the writer. Verbal felicity or verbal awkwardness aside, the essential rhetorical pose of Expensive Peopkis perhaps more mad than simply feverish, more sentimentally eclectic (in the kitsch sense) than tragically enlightened …

  Time Magazine:

  Confused and confusing tale of a child with a famous madcap socialite mother and a dear doddering foolish father, set in that well-covered terrain, Suburbia. Everett sets out to prove that he can outsmartre Sartre but doesn't quite make it. It is all great fun though. As there should be, there are Problems with Mother. But these are probably resolved as the novel progresses. Hijinks galore, but, like a damp firecracker, most of them smolder rather than explode. There is a hint of patronage in all this (we are asked to believe the author is only eleven!), as there is in the best of documentaries about Eskimo or New Zealand customs. Of course it has all been done before, and with superior skill, by John O'Hara and Louis Auchincloss, and if and when Everett learns the lyric cry of rapture and horror which these authors call forth he will perhaps be worthy of our attention.

  The New Republic:

  Expensive People has as its verbal mode the reduction of a generation's anguish to the insufferable lyricism of one child; as the talisman of at least one plane of its purported operations, it exhibits vast mountains of junk (middle-class acquisitions, symbolic of life), about which its child-narrator turns dizzily, dreaming not simply the manic dream of the middle class (which never wakes in this novel), but also the manic dream of the would-be novelist who would reduce complex sociological material to a thalamic crisis. For the mythic-sexual-sociological dimension is what Everett desires, though he fails utterly in his inability to get very far beyond common psychosexual boundaries into realms of metaphysical and cultural-philosophical recognition. The whole point of the doomed child is his legendary quality: exemplary of the American confusion between orders of being, of our perpetual conversion of sexuality into one kind of art and the consequent depletion of the sexual by being turned into emblem and shady metaphor. This entire problem was taken up only two months ago by the “Faintest Idea” troupe, who are running an amateur living theater in San Francisco, and their insistence upon definite ritualistic analogues and socio-emblematic drama have, in my opinion at least, cleared up this issue once and for all. Their shattering play, Genghis Proust, which takes place on a pitch-black stage, has been reviewed at length earlier in The New Republic, and I need say no more about it except to underscore my feeling that only at such points of moral infinity can this new energy find its proper mode in the creation of revolutionary substance. Expensive People, traditional as Charles Dickens, is therefore an irrelevant exercise …

  Hanley Stuart Hingham, a famous critic, writing in any one of the literary quarterlies:

  And now we turn from Nabokov's scintillating anal fantasies to the crude oral fantasies of one Richard Everett, in a first novel called Expen-sive People. Worthless as sociological material (Everett shows a most na'ive admiration for the Businessman, suggesting he's never met one), ludicrous as drama (any alert reader, thumbing through the book, will be able to predict the sorry outcome), embarrassing as prose (I'm the only reviewer content with the assertion that the author is an eighteen-year-old madman, I'm sure), Expensive People is nevertheless valuable as a fabulous excursion into the realm of the orally obsessed. Food abounds in this memoir. Sex is metamorphosed into the more immediate, more salivating form of food, so that it can be taken legally and morally through the mouth. But, as if to deny this surreptitious gratification, the novel is also filled with vomit. Those of us who have read Freud (I have read every book, essay, and scrap of paper written by Freud) will recognize easily the familiar domestic triangle here, of a son's homosexual and incestuous love for his father disguised by a humdrum Oedipal attachment to his mother. Author Everett, obviously an amateur, failed to make the best use of his oral theme by his crudity of material. He should have had the crazy young hero gobble down hot-dogs, ice-cream cones, ladyfingers, all-day suckers. Instead, Everett doesn't bother specifying the food imagery. It is this lack of skill that sets him apart from Nabokov, whose every sentence is calculated, whose every image calls up at once from the deepest reservoirs of our souls Freudian responses of the sort that make Great Literature.

  6

  Gustave told me later that the evening of the chamber-music concert had been an unusual evening for his father. “He was tired when he flew in from Spain, and he probably should have rested,” Gustave said meekly.

  I want to describe Gustave again, since he looked so much like me. You probably don't know what I looked like. He was a small, slender child with a patient and ageless face, serious eyes, a thin, serious mouth, and glasses with pink transparent frames; his narrow shoulders had the look of carrying enormous invisible burdens. Children like this are given to sudden eruptions of shrill, nervous laughter, after which they lapse into the silence that seems characteristic of them. We metamorphose into middle age without much strain, and the silence of our childhoods turns into a certain fussiness in old age about food, drafts from windows that only seem to be closed, and changing times.

  Gustave told me that his father had done a peculiar thing that night: when he drove up the Hofstadter driveway he deliberately ran into the garage door, which was closed. The door was usually operated by electricity, like all Fernwood garage doors, but something had happened to the mechanism in the automobile, and when Mr. Hofstadter turned up his driveway and pressed his button, nothing happened. In Fernwood (I should have mentioned this earlier) all garage doors slide meekly up when their owners' automobiles turn in the driveway. They just do. Children don't question this; it is a fact of ordinary life. But the seeing-eye mechanism broke down that night and Mr. Hofstadter's finger was impotent on the button, but keep going he did, his gaze steady and cold on the garage door, and he ran right into it going ten miles an hour and crumpled the garage door and the front of his car. But he seemed satisfied, Gustave reported, for the first time that day. He went right inside the house and upstairs and to bed, where he slept soundly.

  Something strange happened in my own life, with my own father. When Father arrived home the next day he asked me about the concert. We sat, two rambling, happy bachelors, in the Family Room, which we had never used, gazing through a big plate-glass patio door onto a patio, which we had never used and were never to use, and Father asked me closely about Mozart. I noticed that Father wore a new suit, not yet rumpled. He was not a handsome man but there was something attractive about his face, or perhaps his expression. You could tell by looking at him that he wanted to be good, and wasn't wanting almost enough? (In my desperate reading in preparation for this memoir I came across the heresies of one Flavius Maurus, who believed that the only Good was in desire and not in act, since purity can exist only in the mind. In his religion, wouldn't Father be saved?) I feel the itch to describe my father on all these pages, to get him down good once and for all, but do you know it's almost impossible? I always kept imagining that he wasn't really my father and another man would take his place. I was crazy. This big, lumpy, strong man with his tobacco-stained fingers and his habit of twirling wine about in wine glasses with a loving, precise skill was my father, all mine, and in a way he may be your father too. Let's all share him! And if you are a father yourself,you'll see yourself in Father. One cannot imagine him as a child or a young man, since he has been full-grown for so long, with his past as compact behind him as his wallet, which is filled not with money but credit cards, slim and flat, stuffed in his back pocket, his past so very slim and flat itself that for all practical purposes it did not exist. And his future? Imaginable only as a
n extension and inflation of his present.

  He said, “I always did admire Mozart but you know I haven't had the time to develop that side of myself. I'm going to set aside two hours of each day, from now on, to catch up on things. Dickie, have you done much reading in Sartre?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Yes, well. Sartre is well worth reading.”

  “We read something in French class once, just an essay. It was sort of hard.”

  Father brightened at hearing this. “Yes, well, Kid, everything worthwhile is difficult, as Plato said. Or did Plato say everything difficult is worthwhile? It's the same thing. But I think Sartre has something to say and I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to give him the time to say it to me.”

  He smiled and seemed to be awaiting my approval.

  I filled in great gaps of time by sleeping and eating, lying around the house. Sometimes I would be awakened by Father's striding into the room, all set for our daily afternoon walk, or ready to drive us to a Little League baseball game some friends' kids were in. He had a full life, Nada or no Nada. Father had instructed Florence to take the mail in before I got hold of it, so I didn't know if Nada was writing to him or not. She had stopped writing to me. There was something mysterious going on. I felt strange and inert, like a sleepwalker, and even when I did want to wake up I couldn't. I couldn't make myself rise out of sleep. Sometimes it frightened me, because I thought I might die, and the only thing to do was to think about something, some single, crucial thing that could draw me out of this paralysis. So I contemplated my toothbrush, which was far away upstairs, and imagined its appearance until my heart pounded with renewed vigor and I had to run up to my bathroom to check that trivial object. So far, so good. Or I doubted the reality of Florence, our good maid, and had to run to see her. Or I tried to reconstruct the room I had spent eighteen months of my life in back in Charlotte Pointe, imagining each wall, window, the furniture, the ugly tile, the apple tree outside. It took such enormous mental efforts to raise me out of my lethargy.

  And another mysterious thing: Father began taking me to foreign movies. Films. We sat through a three-hour technicolor extravaganza of fantasies, enormous idealized bodies of males and females, and though I liked the splash of color well enough I didn't have any idea what was happening. And we saw a peculiar black-and-white film in which a couple pursue a disappeared girl over an island and a mainland, for hours, days, weeks, but fail to find her, and so it went. Despite my boredom I remember being struck by a sense of gritty, relentless futility in that movie, precisely the same futility I myself lived in. Afterward Father said, “Antonioni captures perfectly the malaise of the modern world, don't you think?”

  “Huh?”

  “His searching people, his ruins, his sand, his … well, you know, all the gadgets and stuff. Don't you think he captures it?”

  “I guess so,” I said. I was a little worried because one of the rambling, cheerful bachelors seemed to be changing.

  Even his healthy outrage seemed to be weakening. When Florence tsk-tsked about the current newspaper drama—a girl of eleven abducted by a madman who was finally shot down by police—Father did not respond as usual with a hearty yelp of hatred, saying that it was the worst thing this state had ever done to revoke the death penalty; he seemed hardly to have heard. “Don't know what the world's coming to,” Florence muttered, making our breakfast, and Father, who was glancing through the Wall Street Journal on one side of his plate and the Partisan Review on the other, did no more than agree vaguely as he chewed his toast.

  7

  At last he explained everything. He came home early one day and shortly afterward a man in a run-down truck brought Father a FOR SALE INQUIRE WITHIN sign for the front lawn. We were moving again!

  “We'll see how crazy I am to try selling it myself. We'll see.” Father chuckled.

  He had Florence clean the house inch by inch, and install flowers on the foyer table, the dining-room table, and the marble-topped table in the living room. Florence wore a dainty apron and a lace cap, and I was dressed in my Johns Behemoth blazer, my hair slicked down onto my forehead so that I looked like an English public-school boy, or someone's idea of one. I sat idly in the den, at the grand piano, and when would-be buyers were shown through the house I glanced at them, nodded stiffly, and turned back to my music. Father had other tricks too. He did not seem to be selling anything. He stressed the tight market, the difficulty of attaining a mortgage unless (and here his eyes would move kindly but realistically to the visitor's face) the borrower was quite well-off. And the maintenance of a house like this was high, he said, and mentioned prices that were absurdly low. “You will want the lawn serviced, of course; I think that's sixty a month.” Or “The man with the little snowplow charges twenty dollars a winter to clear the walk.”

  And did it work? Of course. The house was sold in the first week for $88,000, a fine profit. He sold it to a family named Body who were moving up from Cleveland; the man was in advertising and needed a good-looking house. The wife hesitated over the circle driveway, thinking that it was “almost too much,” but in the end she gave in; all women like things that are almost too much.

  8

  Moving did not upset me. Instead it made me feel slower than ever, bogged down, helpless. I sat around and watched the movers pack lamps and dishes, stuffing in newspapers skillfully and endlessly. The movers were competent men. I thought dreamily that they might pick me up and stuff me in one of the boxes, lined with newspaper, and ship me off to the new house. Florence was out in the kitchen, helping with the good china. She had never met Nada but she tsk-ed and clucked over the beautiful china and kept saying that she “would not be responsible” for what happened.

  Didn't she know that no one was ever responsible for anything?

  One by one things were packed up and packed off. There went Nada's table, there went the chair Father called “his” though he never sat in it. From upstairs came a procession of things that should have looked familiar—”my” own furniture. “My” things. I watched them with interest. Everything was so friendly. We owned all these things. They did not cause us pain and they had hardly cost us any money. Up from the basement came another procession of “our” things—washing machine, dryer, lawn furniture, a glass-topped table with elegant curlicues of iron, “my” old bow-and-arrow set, “my” badminton set, boxes and boxes of nameless things that must have belonged to us. Bundles and cartons. Suitcases that had been packed for the last move and had not yet been unpacked. Were we saying good-by to Nada in this sneaky way?

  Florence said, “Richard, why are you crying?”

  “I'm not crying,” I said.

  I was watching the big orange moving van drive away. It drove slowly up Burning Bush Way and took off in the direction of “our” new home, which Father had already bought. Another home, another town. My bones creaked and got me to my feet. I had to get ready because Father was coming home soon and we could start off in the car for our new life. Father had been invited by a certain highly successful firm, BWK, to take over one of their divisions. He explained his new job to me, but I hadn't listened carefully enough. I was having difficulty hearing, or maybe it was difficulty seeing. I couldn't match the sounds of words with the funny movements made by the speaker's lips. Even when Florence talked there was something odd. Her words came at me faster than her lips seemed able to shape them. A hodgepodge of sounds and ringing noises buzzed in my brain. I felt as if I were asleep even when I was awake, and because I was asleep everything was a dream and anything could happen.

  Oh, we are so strangely matched with our dreams! We are so strangely suited to them, no matter how obscene or hilarious they are, and no matter how angrily we deny them. Yes, we always deny them. Looking back on Fernwood, now, as I write this memoir, I can see that Fernwood itself was a dream, and everyone in it dreaming the dream; all in conjunction, happy, so long as no one woke up. If one sleeper wakened, everything would have been stretch
ed and jerked out of focus, and so … the end of Fernwood, the end of Western civilization! One would as soon trust Charles Spoon (that immensely talented designer of automobiles now applying to design another kind of weapon) with the life and death of Western civilization as one would trust people like Nada and myself with dreaming the good happy dream of Fern-wood. We were failures. And so … were we saying good-by to Nada, sneaking off? Were Father and I packing up the stuff of our dream and taking it to another setting, where it could flourish safely away from all memories of that woman who kept waking and disturbing everyone?

  Because—and this is the only truth I know about my mother, a most sorry truth—she wanted only to live but she didn't know how, that was why she made a mess. Messes are made by people who want but don't know what they want, let alone how to get it. And all the messes she made!

  Father came, there were good-bys with Florence (three separate ones, awkward and moving), there was an exchange of money, the keys were dropped off at an attorney's office, I was entrusted with the road map, which looked like the plan for the intestines of a giant insect, and off we drove into the sunset. Father drove well, just like Mr. Hofstadter. He did not look back. I did not look back. But I could see in my mind's eye the placid winding streets (ways, lanes, drives) of Fernwood leading back farther and farther into the dimness of the past I had already spent here, from January to April of an uneventful year for Fernwood but a year to end all other years in my life.