“Expensive People”: Beautiful perversity

Joyce Carol Oates’ “Expensive People” is a flamboyantly and deliberately perverse comic novel born (!) of a an extraordinary premise. According to Greg Johnson in “Understanding Joyce Carol Oates,” the author wondered if it would be possible to write from the viewpoint of “one’s own unborn, unconceived child, giving grotesque albeit comic reasons for its remaining unborn, unconceived.”

The story poses as the memoirs of Richard Everett and, if he is the child Oates might have conceived, she can rightly congratulate herself for having rigorously practiced contraception – although I cannot specify all of the reasons for that without giving the plot away.

Richard is eighteen years old at the time he is supposedly penning his autobiography and was eleven when the traumatic events it describes supposedly took place. In this blackly comic novel, nothing is certain and Oates continuously plays with that uncertainty, toying with the reader’s expectations and frustrations.

Richard Everett is a larger-than-life character in every way: intellectually gifted, emotionally stunted, and a self-described glutton who is enormously obese.

He is also up on all the latest psychological theories and self-consciously aware that his mind may be playing tricks on itself. He notes that “if I tell [my story] now and not next year it will come out one way, and if I . . . forced [myself] to begin this a year ago it would have been a different story then. And it’s possible I’m lying without knowing it. Or telling the truth in some weird, symbolic way without knowing it . . .” Richard often interrupts his story to give us what he imagines reviewers will say about his book and to tell us how various mental health experts might diagnose.

The antagonist to Richard’s deliberately absurd protagonist is his mother, Nada Everett, a lithe, pale, and dark-haired novelist and short story writer.

This writer/mother is Oates’s most savage portrait of an egoist. Like many of Oates’s anti-hero(ine)s, Nada exalts freedom as the highest good. Since Nada is a mother, complete freedom means she often shirks responsibility. Richard craves the unconditional love and attention finds “Nada” — the nothingness symbolized by her name.

Throughout the novel, Oates lampoons concerns with materialism and status, suggesting such preoccupations leave people, and especially their children, as emotionally empty as Nada.

“Expensive People” is a wise and witty critique of human frailty and a fantastic and bizarre work of brilliant perversity.