Joyce Oates’s “Expensive People
Background of the Study
There is no more versatile and accomplished American writer than Joyce Carol Oates. The author of many books, Oates has penned bestselling novels, critically acclaimed collections of short fiction, as well as essays, plays, poetry, memoirs, and an unlikely bestseller, On Boxing. Her remarkable literary industry – which includes work as an editor and anthologist – spans forms, themes, topics and genres. Writing in The Nation, critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. said, “A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.” In 2010, reflecting the widespread esteem in which her work is held, President Barack Obama awarded Oates the National Humanities Medal.
Best known for her fiction, Oates’ novels include them, which won the National Book Award; The Falls, which won the France’s Prix Femina; and We Were the Mulvaneys, which follows the disintegration of an American family and which became a bestseller after being selected by Oprah’s Book Club. Other novels include The Accursed, which Stephen King described as “the world’s first postmodern Gothic novel,” A Book of American Martyrs, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and 48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister which received the Prix Fitzgerald.
Her 2025 novel Fox, received star reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, while the New York Times called it “impressive and unsettling.” Her 2026 titles include The Frenzy which received a star review from Publishers Weekly, and the reprint collections Double Trouble and Second Nature(Hard Case Crime, September 19, 2026) each containing two novels and two short stories originally written under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. In 2027 she will release a book of stories titled The Massacre at Mount Pitcairn (The Mysterious Press, January 19, 2027), and a novel titled Orphan (Hogarth, June 15, 2027).
High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006 gathers Oates’ short fiction from earlier collections and includes eleven additional tales that further demonstrate the artistry and originality of a writer who “has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces” (Chicago Tribune). Included in this volume is Oates’ most anthologized short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Inspired by a song by Bob Dylan, it was later adapted as a film, Smooth Talk. It is one of a handful of Oates’ works made into films or movies for television, including Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (2012), by Palme d’Or winner Laurent Cantet. Oates’ novel Blonde was adapted for the stage by Argia Coppola as Love is Blonde and also as a film for Netflix directed by Andrew Dominik and starring Ana de Armas.
Since 1963, over forty of Oates’s books have been included on the New York Times list of notable books of the year. Among her many honors are two O. Henry Prizes and five Bram Stoker Awards, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, a World Fantasy Award, and the M. L. Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She has received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Critics Circle, the Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the PEN Center USA Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Poets & Writers Distinguished Lifetime Award, the Bilbao BBK Ja! Prize, The Jerusalem Prize, the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, the 2023 Taobuk Award for Literary Excellence, and the 2026 World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. She is the subject of a documentary titled A Body in the Service of Mind, directed by Stig Björkman and produced by Mantaray Film. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Significance of the Study
Richard Everett, the narrator of this novel, is not like the main characters in Oates’ previous novels. Not only is he male and a child (he is around ten years old when the novel starts), he is brought up in a very affluent environment. His father is a successful executive, rapidly rising up the corporate ladder. His mother – Natashya Romanov but wittily known as Nada – is a minor novelist with some success. She pretends to be the daughter of Russian aristocrats but is, in fact, the daughter of poor Russian immigrants. Richard is infatuated with his mother and is continually spying on her. She, however, is less interested in him and frequently goes away, to have affairs and for other R & R activities. But when Richard finds both her notebook, with ideas for a story about a young man who snipes at people, missing the first three times but, now he is conditioned, being more successful the fourth time, and her short story The Molesters, an actual short story written by Oates, he plans her murder. The novel is the eighteen year old Richard writing about it. However, it is left unclear as to whether he did kill his mother or only did so in fantasy. Once again, Oates shows us the violent and seamy side of American life, even if, this time, it is from on top and not down below. And, once again, it is a very successful novel.
In“Expensive People,” Joyce Carol Oates has made a very large demand upon her literary imagination and her talent. She has asked herself to become a 250-pound 18-year-old boy- genius sitting alone in a shabby rented room composing a memoir about how he assassinated one of his parents seven years before. The novel has, among its other qualities, a great deal of good old- fashioned suspense, so I won’t say which parent, although by the time the act is committed this choice has the inevitability of tragedy.
Miss Oates, as her earlier books “A Garden of Earthly Delights” and “With Shuddering Fall” established, has a great deal of talent, and it rises strongly to this formidable challenge.
Richard, who is 10 years old and then 11 during the events he is feverishly telling us about, is a queasy library person,” all thick glasses and ailments and precocity, a child of affluence whose parents rather forget he exists for long periods. Moving from one privileged Midwestern suburb to another as his father rises in the corporate world, he is thrust, aged 10, into a certain species of academically demanding, expensive private school to which bright, rich, neglected boys are sent too young. This frees his father to continue his business successes; and it frees his mother, Nada, to be nothing in the family group.
Nada is the core of the novel. She is a beautiful woman in her thirties, Russian by descent, determined to have all the privileges of affluence but driven periodically to abandon her husband and son and suburb for New York, lovers and literature. Nada is a writer of national reputation. An extremely effective, and relevant, story by her is printed to prove her talent. In her family, and in this novel, however, we do not otherwise experience that side of her. “My mother wasn’t stupid,” Richard writes, “but for some reason I will never know she acted stupid most of the time. She was deliberately, spitefully, stubbornly, passionately stupid.” I will never know the reason for that either.
Miss Oates has no trouble becoming a semi-insane, boy-genius murderer, but she doesn’t quite bring off a talented woman writer. We do not see many responses to her beauty, except her son’s, so we have to take that quality of hers more or less on faith too. It is her stupidity, bitchiness, solipsistic outlook, and superficiality that is portrayed in the novel.
Nada loves the suburbs. She writes with extreme sensitivity and skill, but she loves the Anglophile country clubs, the comfy libraries, the horrendous beauty shops Miss Oates evokes so well. This world of fit men and slim women who never “come loose” is expertly depicted in all its privilege and isolation. But finally Nada’s other nature reasserts itself, and she flees to some invisible Bohemia; and Richard, after this third abandonment by an adored mother who was in any case “always backing out of the driveway,” slips into a permanent daze. Most persuasively, Miss Oates then leads us through his alienation, his ordering a shotgun by mail, his deliberately off-target pot shots at the neighbors, to the moment when he must turn on one of his own parents.
Does anyone question the wide and immediate relevance of this material? I wonder how many hundred, or thousand, American boys each year suddenly begin sniping at people. And the role the sudden shot out of nowhere has played on our national scene is there before us.
Technically, Miss Oates had many problems, with which she was usually, but not always, successful. The most pressing problem with first-person narrative is how to include scenes the narrator would not ordinarily witness. No unearthed diaries or stumbled-upon letters for Joyce Carol Oates. Her narrator is a compulsive spy, that’s all, and skillfully uses laundry chutes and upstairs landings to eavesdrop.
First-person narrative is a powerful and tricky concoction. Like a shot of sodium pentothal. it leads to eloquent self-revelations, to strong, immediate effects, and it can also lead to self-concern, self- indulgence, this-is-me-in-all-my-complexity writing. This occurs from time to time here. Richard Everett interrupts his gripping narrative quite often to insist that this is fact, not fiction, that it is all absolutely true and therefore hasn’t the formal organization of fiction. And yet he writes all these conventionally expert novelistic scenes. He digresses to give us his views on art, writing, imagery, puns, you, me, and so on. For example, he wrote this review for me.
In 1968 we want the facts; we want “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” just as though they were really his; we want “In Cold Blood,” and Miss Oates here gives us what might be subtitled “The Absolutely True Confessions of a Parent Murderer.” Very well, if she wants it that way. I myself didn’t need it. I was more than willing to believe that this excellent novel was all too desperately true of human nature, of intellectually gifted, neglected boys, of our affluence and our strangeness in this country now.
Mr. Knowles’s new book is “Phineas and Other Stories.”
Expensive People and Wonderland both contain families that reside in suburbia and embody the kind of life Oates presents as typical of that area. Both suburban families are financially comfortable and socially elite, but neither is secure and happy. Though material success has been gained, familial relationships have been lost in the pursuit of the American dream that has led both families to suburbia. Natashya (Nada) and Elwood Everett of Expensive People are showy, pretentious people, proud of their place on the social scale and struggling hard to live beyond their means. Their cars (a Cadillac and a Lincoln) and their clothes (a mink coat for Nada and an expensive overcoat for Elwood) typify their existence; they are obviously moneyed and snobbish. Keeping up the pretense of wealth is important to them; in fact, that pretension is the subject of their first argument in the novel. Elwood thinks the price of the house they are looking at is inflated, and the real estate salesman appears indignant that Mr. Everett
would not recognize the quality of the home. Natashya is embarrassed, feeling that Elwood has made them seem common; truly rich people do not care about price. Her whispered admonition to him: “Shut up, you stupid son-of-a-bitch! Oh, you loud-mouthed, vulgar son-of-a-bitch””-^ draws surprise from the realtor, but the child-narrator of the story is unshaken. In the interior monologue that comprises the entire novel, he recounts: “I smirked a little and tried to catch his eye so he’d know this was nothing unusual, don’t be upset, oh, nothing unusual! Common, daily!” (p. 16). In just such an environment the child, Richard, has grown to be ten years old. His family is hardly the picture of suburban tranquillity, but he believes that he and his parents are happy, even though a friend told him once that when the three of them were walking together, they looked like “three strangers who have met by accident on a walk and are waiting for the first chance to get away from one another” (p. 19). Richard’s belief in the family unit is a fantasy that he has constructed to cover the reality of their personalities:
Richard has even entertained doubts that those two people—Natashya and Elwood—are really his parents. He loves them, undoubtedly, but their lack of real familial relationships causes him to wonder about the nature of their kinship. Of Elwood he observes: while I loved Father I did not really believe he was my father. .. . I thought that another father might be waiting somewhere off in the wings and that at the next cocktail party, if I listened hard and crept as close to the living room as I dared, I might hear the strong, hard, even brutal voice of my true father. (pp. 24-26)
The boy also questions the idea of Nada’s being his mother: I stared at her and wondered if she was my mother, if she was my mother, and how had it come to pass? How was it possible she made me undergo such torture and had nothing to offer me as consolation but the glitter of Father’s jewels? (p. 45) Though the family situation is precarious as the novel begins, Richard can remember when it was even worse. His mother’s artistic temperament causes her to be restless, and every now and then she leaves her husband and child, though they plead with her to stay. The child is now almost eleven, and he remembers two epidodes of separation from his mother: one when he was six and one when he
was nine. He senses that she will leave again someday soon, and his foreboding is correct, though it is not to happen just yet. Richard’s insecurities are not unfounded; he frequently answers the telephone to hear a man’s voice asking for his mother, and he senses an intimacy between the two of them. Between himself and his mother there is no intimacy, only a sense of desperation: Nada trying to escape from the humdrum of her existence, and Richard holding on to her, knowing despairingly that she is destined to leave him. Though the fight between Nada and Elwood over Mr. Everett’s behavior to the real estate salesman is the first mentioned in Richard’s memoir, it is by no means the last. The child admits to being an eavesdropper, and what he hears is: The fight over a stained silk cushion on a Queen Anne chair, on our first day in the house.
The fight over Father’s Negro jokes at a party. The fight over Father’s “baggy trousers.” The fight over Father’s shirts, which were all dirty. The fight over Nada’s correction of Father’s pronunciation of “incognito.” The fight over Nada’s naive admiration for the local and internationally famous H F , whom Father renounced with middle-class gusto, along with his wife. The fight following from this, when Father called Nada a parvenu. The shrieking fight over the mildew in the front lawn, which was gray-blue and deadly. The hysterical fight over my eyeglasses. (“Whose eyes did he inherit, whose? He’ll have glasses like the bottoms of Coke bottles . . .”) The fight over the canned goods in the basement storeroom, whose labels had all peeled off mysteriously. The fight over the warped piano key—I believe it was G two octaves above middle C.
The fight over . . . And, a week ago, another ficjht over—I believe it was over Jean-Paul Sartre, whom Father rejected as a “Communist writer.” And . . . And all the other fights that were about nothing, (pp. 82-83) The fights continue until no holds are barred and they scream accusations at each other, Nada accusing Elwood of hating her, and Elwood telling Nada that she is neurotic and crazy, and if she should leave again, he would not ask her to come back. Richard’s own sad but accurate comment on their emotions explains precisely the state of the suburban family: “When all their stage props were ripped away, they always showed that they needed no fresh reasons to hate. They simply hated” (p. 84). In spite of Nada’s apparent obliviousness to her son, he continues to love her wholly and selfishly. When he knows that she is going to leave, he becomes sick; surely she wouldn’t leave her child in his time of illness! But she plans to do just that, and when she begins her speech explaining her need for freedom, Richard knows all the words and the reasons and just wants her to get out and spare him the misery of prolonging her farewell. The days that follow should have been happy for him; Elwood and the boy do all the things fathers and sons should do together but these two have somehow ignored. Above all, pretenses must be kept up, and Elwood tells an inquisitive “friend” of Nada’s that she has merely gone east to visit
Expensive People, then, traces the Everetts through their lives as a suburban family and shows the decline of familial relationships in that setting. The mother is primarily to blame for the family’s failures, but Oates also provides background to show that she too is a product of her family environment. Living in an expensive house and entertaining wealthy people does not give the Everetts the satisfaction they are seeking; nor does Richard find happiness in the private school to which he, along with other neglected suburban boys, is sent. Nada escapes from her urban parents and their restraints only to find that 72 suburban life also has responsibilities, responsibilities that she does not want and cannot handle.
The decadent family in this novel is the result of the lack of love that necessarily occurs between selfish people, but it is the child of the family who suffers the most even though he is the one who has the capacity for loving. As has been the case with urban families and rural families, the mother holds in her hands the ability to create whatever family atmosphere she desires, but contemporary mothers, at least in Oates’s novels, refuse to look beyond themselves. The unwanted child of Expensive People rebels against his suburban home and parents, resorting to an act of violence to sever completely the relationship between the family members.
Natashya’s Desire and Cause for Materialistic Pleasure: The downfall of Natashya plays a significant role in Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Expensive People. The reader’s cognition makes a debate with the text to expose the existing flaws that lead to her death. The title Expensive People itself has some metaphorical aspects because it almost reveals the context of the text. At first glance, the reader of the text will dive to the conclusion that the plot of the novel is about some issues of a well-settled sophisticated family. But culling out deeper uncovers the unexplored meaning of the text. The present research raises various questions regarding the chaotic end of Natashya. These questions appeal to the cognitive efficiency of the reader. A bonding between a mother and her son is stronger than any relationship.
But Natashya Romanov’s love for Richard is very flat. She is a self-centered woman, who rejects her family and wishes to live an independent life. Natashya’s quest for worldly pleasure makes her travel on the path of anti-feminism which is a considerable satire Oates proposes in the plot. Natashya’s quest for earthly yearning stems from her difficult childhood experiences due to her Russian heritage. Nada’s mental behaviors can be investigated as the struggling life of a Russian immigrant in America. Nada discloses the truth about her ambition for popularity towards the end of the tale and wonders about the null reason behind her Jewish ancestor’s execution. Nada strongly believed that she will be also getting executed for no reason, so she decides to get a prominent position in society to escape her imaginary tragic ending. Nada’s early-stage struggling horrors her throughout the novel. This is one of the hubris of her in the novel.
Natashya Romanov’s quest for earthly pleasure is visualized in the first section of the novel, where she orders her husband to procure the property in Fernwood despite their economic condition. Because Fernwood in the novel gets compared to ‘Paradiso’, it is the coziest place, where all the well-settled people reside. She shared no emotions for her son and husband. Her thirst for fame and power made her forget Richard, which eventually leads to her tragic flaw. She is a perfect projection of a woman who misunderstands the concept of feminine equality and eventually follows the path of anti-feminism. To portray herself as a member of an aristocratic society, she started writing fiction and ordered her husband to buy a house in Fernwood. She was intoxicated with it. She was intoxicated with our house – with her new expensive furniture, her marble-topped table and her exquisite bookshelf, given to her by father’s great-aunt and worth oh let me
tell you! – quite a bit. She was intoxicated with expensive tidbits ginger had unfrozen not half an hour before, she was intoxicated with her white, white dress. (Oates, 46) Throughout the narrative, Nada is fascinated by her fashion sense. Nada’s actions or societal sense might be identified ironically because she pays more attention to her dress while still keeping her room unclean. Also, she never acknowledges the time with her family and enjoys solitude in her room. She spends hours with her typewriter which has caused difficulties for her family.
Richard dislikes Natashya from an early age due to her selfish nature and her preference for more expensive items than her son. She never provided Richard with what he lacked. The plot’s first problem is a lack of love for an eleven-year-old son. Her misjudgment of the scenario plays a significant part in the narrative. Nada’s love of sunglasses becomes another weakness because it conceals all of her feelings behind the spectacles. For example, in the opening section of the novel, Richard wishes to shatter the glass into two pieces so that his mother might show him some attention. This reveals Richard’s sorrow behind his happy facade. Natashya’s fondness for worldly pleasure is a key reason for her defect in the narrative, which sadly ends her life. Natashya’s love for earthly pleasure can be expressed as an outcome of the struggles that she witnessed in her childhood days. Natashya’s disrespectful attitude toward her husband: Another problem of Natashya is her rude attitude toward her husband Elwood. Elwood and her son are used to meet her worldly desires. “She had married father the way a girl goes on a date with a man she does not like at all or even knows” (30).
Natashya and Mr. Elwood both had a difficult marriage, which significantly impacted their son Richard’s mentality. She forbids her family from reading her work and forbids them from entering her library. “Nada forbade me to look at anything of hers, of course, just as she forbade father, neither of us could enter her study” (49). This implies a sense of estrangement from her family. She had even abandoned him and Richard three times and moved in with another man for no apparent reason. Even after these experiences, Elwood’s love for his wife did not change, and he accepted her with love. But Nada’s attitude towards her family left an impression on Richard, and he eventually grew to welcome her absence from the house. He even celebrates her absence by going out with Gustave and his family.
But Elwood Everett’s love for his wife is deeper than the reader may comprehend. After discovering Natashya’s affair with Sheer in New York, he accepts her. “Your mother has left this house and is living in New York City with someone named Sheer – and we know all about him too!” (105). Their relationship deteriorated after her reunion with her spouse in Cedar Grove. She begins to live her own life. Nada declares their relationship to be amicable. This explains their relationship’s hollowness. This emptiness could be the result of their disinterest in sexual life and disagreements.
For instance, Nada disrespects Elwood in a meeting by refusing his words in front of an editor expressing her supremacy over her husband. Natashya’s vision of herself as an independent woman leads her down the path of anti-feminism. It is true that many women misunderstand the concept of feminism. Her desire to be a self-sufficient woman leads her down the wrong path, which is one of the key causes of her catastrophic collapse. Natashya’s failure as a mother: Natashya in order to present herself as an aristocratic person forces her son to enter John Behemoth Boys School. Another cause for her shortcomings is that she was unaware of Richard’s desire and never
cared about it. She makes her son take an IQ test in order for him to be admitted to the school. Unfortunately for Richard, he had a low IQ score and was rejected by Natashya. She even tells Richard to stop referring to her as a mother. Instead of soothing Richard, she displays dislike for her son. Because John Behemoth is one of Fernwood’s most prestigious schools, where all of the aristocratic families send their children to learn. Even if she claims it is for the benefit of Richards’ career, her attitude towards this occurrence has some personal significance. Finally, after passing the IQ test, Natashya lavishes Richard with affection and brings him to the park as a result of gratifying her yearning. This was the first time she had taken her son outside the house. This is one of the reasons Richard harbours ill will towards his mother.
Natashya controls every action of Richard so that she can project herself as a higher-class society woman. While walking with her son into John Behemoth’s school she insists and pokes him to walk straighter even though it hurts him. Richard calls this incident miserable and questions whether it is his fault to be a child. Nada spends more time with people like Dean Nash and his wife and does not give importance to her own family. Her behaviour typifies aristocratic ladies in the late postwar period when they talk about cricket, politics, and other important issues in order to appear occupied in society. In order to be self-sufficient, she rejects her son three times in the narrative. He was a baby the first time, six the second time, and eleven the third time.
Following her departure from Fernwood, Richard enters her mother’s chamber and watches everything in a haphazard manner, symbolizing his mother’s muddled intellect. In her pursuit of fame and power, Nada neglects her family, which is the beginning of her downfall. Richard divides her mother into two categories.
One who frequently rejects him and shows no regard for him. Another image he created in his imagination is of how his mother should be. Two Nadas existed – the one who was free and one who abandoned me often and the other who has become fixed irreparably in my brain, an embryonic creature of my own making, my extravagant and deranged imagination- and I loved them both, I swear it was both of them I carved. (Oates 83) Natashya’s existence in Richard’s memory is compared to an ’embryonic creature,’ which he chops down near the end of the story. Despite the fact that he believes this assignment is impossible, he assassinated her since he had no other choice. Richard frequently tells his readers that Natashya’s death will bring his book to an end, which would finally lead to his death also.
He compares Nada’s appearance to Medusa, a terrifying figure from Greek mythology. Medusa had a curse that turned any man who saw her eyes into stone; similarly, Nada’s appearance was horrifying, and Richard had no words to express her horrific vision on him. Nada’s absence in Richard’s life made his life a chaotic one psychologically, he barely had a friend and longed for love. Nada’s assumption that her son can do whatever she can, made his boyhood days miserable. For example, to demonstrate her authority over her son, she forces him to talk in French at a party given by Dean Nash. Richard becomes a puppet in Nada’s hands, and she eventually develops a loathing for her mother. Richard compares himself to a translucent piece of glass that can be easily broken into millions of pieces.
Natashya’s feelings for Richard waned following their reunion in Cedar Grove; she could not even recall how old he was. Because he was rejected by her mother for her selfishness at an early age, he began to generate a sense of irritation for her, and in the end, Nada died tragically. This is another factor that leads to the flaws of Natashya.