Wonderland: A Quartet

A GARDEN ON EARTHLY DELIGHTS by Joyce Carol Oates, New York, Vanguard Press: 1967.

EXPENSIVE PEOPLE by Joyce Carol Oates, New York, Vanguard Press: 1968.

THEM by Joyce Carol Oates, New York, Vanguard Press: 1969.

WONDERLAND by Joyce Carol Oates, New York, Vanguard Press: 1971; revised edition published by Modern Library, New York: 2006.

"It seems to me that the greatest works of literature deal with the human soul caught in the stampede of time, unable to gauge the profundity of what passes over it, like the characters of Yeats who live through terrifying events but cannot understand them; in this way history passes over most of us. Society is caught in a convulsion, whatever of growth or of death, and ordinary people are destroyed. They do not, however, understand that they are 'destroyed.' " - excerpt from an interview by Joyce Carol Oates

"Future archaeologists equipped with only her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America."
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., from a review of them.

Only in retrospect have four novels published between 1967-1971 by Joyce Carol Oates become known as the ' Wonderland Quartet." All four were nominated for the National Book Award and them won the prize in 1970. The author was only thirty-two at the time.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. would probably agree that Joyce Carol Oates is the most obvious American writer now living who deserves to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. The lives of women and the distortions of class are consistently present in her work in ways none of her male contemporaries match and seldom attempt. Uneasiness among critics concerning her productivity may be a proxy for these thornier issues.

The Wonderland Quartet came in a rush, beginning three years after Oates published her first novel. The settings are rural upstate New York and the city of Detroit.

A Garden Of Earthly Delights is the story of young Clara Walpole who attempts to escape the poverty and constrictions of small town life by running away with Loury, a drifter, who deserts her when she becomes pregnant. In a bid to gain control of her life, Clara seduces a married man into believing that he is the father of her child. Although he buys her a car and teacher her to drive, Clara is exhausted by her daring. (In a subsequent novel, them, Oates has a character think: "A woman in a car only appears to be in control.") Eventually, she passes on her alienation to her son.

Expensive People examines how the Everett family becomes part of the upper middle class and its uneasy relationship to its origins played out in the obsession of son Richard to avenge his mother's deceptions. Natashya Romanov is a glamorous, successful novelist whose assumed name is her attempt to erase her working class background. (In a wink to the reader, Oates attributes one of her own stories - The Molester - to Natashya.)

"because we are poor/ Shall we be vicious?" is the epigraph Oates chose for them; it comes from the Elizabethan revenge drama, The White Devil. The race riots in 1960s Detroit becomes the maelstrom that tears the Wendall family apart. Through them, the novel chronicles the declining fortunes of industrial cities and the working class families who achieved prosperity there in post-war America. Maureen is a bookish girl yearning for education but, lacking resources, she turns to prostitution. Jules Wendall, made an accidental celebrity by the riots, sees an opportunity to make money from the destruction.

And the final novel, Wonderland, has been described by critic Elaine Showalter as the surrealistic version of the quartet, beginning during the Depression of the 1930s and ending in the 1960s. In its original version, Oates ended Wonderland ambiguously, with a man and a woman adrift in boat on Lake Ontario, but later revised the novel when, as she described it, she was mentally able to get the woman out of that boat.

Image credit: Joyce Carol Oates, 2009, Getty Images, Los Angeles.