Book Review: We Were the Mulvaneys

A Fair Trade Book

Title: We Were the Mulvaneys

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Date: 1996

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 0-525-94223-8

Length: 454 pages

Quote: “We were the Mulvaneys, remember us? You may have thought our family was larger...but in fact there were only six of us.”

Judson Andrew Mulvaney—Judd for short—was the youngest of the six Mulvaneys in his nuclear-family-of-origin. He grew up in a family that was falling apart for reasons he was too young to understand, and the fictive premise of this novel is that he sets out to document and thus understand what went wrong with his parents, brothers, and sister...first with the sister, worse with the father and brothers.

They were a successful, happy, Irish-American Protestant farm family, parents doing well in business, kids doing well in school, pillars of a church, members of a country club they derided but found useful. They loved one another. The three teenagers were starting to date, and were quite popular, none of them yet “in love.” Sister Marianne, though only in grade eleven, was tiara'ed as one of the attendants to the official campus queen, an honor usually reserved for grade twelve. (Brother Patrick, in grade twelve, is less popular but more brilliant. For him, scholarships. Brother Mike, the fullback, bequeathed some of his popularity to them when he went off to college; everyone knew he would go far.)

What went wrong was a date rape, and Marianne's Nice Girl qualms about calling it rape in court, and Mike's, Patrick's, and their father's failure to act as a team and carry out a strategy to punish the lousy creep who goes on to ruin some other classmates' lives. Yes, despite the male point of view, this is an intensely feminist book. Sexual violence affects victims and their families in different ways; for some families, like the Mulvaneys, it actually ruins the men's lives more than the victims'.

All Marianne really wants to do is finish being a happy little Nice Girl at home, and, since her home is falling apart, that's the one thing she'll never get to do. (She will, and I'm grateful to Oates for sparing us the first-person scenes involved, eventually be able to choose the sort of marriage-and-motherhood life for which girls like Marianne were so happily preparing when they were cheerful, contented daughters at home.) Having her around depresses her father, so her mother packs her off to live with a distant cousin, then go to college, then drop out and hit some sort of emotional bottom that even Judd will never know about.

After that Mike joins the Marines, manages to have a successful peacetime military career, and has a reasonably normal life without staying in touch with his parents or siblings. Mr. Mulvaney and Patrick know that they ought to get some sort of justice for Marianne, but they don't sit down and strategize; each one separately ruins his life in his own way, and of course, along the way, they make Mrs. Mulvaney and little Judd fairly miserable too.

I think the purpose of this book was to help some readers achieve some kind of catharsis, but I have to admit that reading it made me feel angry. First of all, Marianne was too dang nice for her own good, and should not have been allowed to go out with boys until she'd learned how to say “no” in ways even a drunken fool can understand. Then her menfolks...

Well. In my home town, when I was growing up, the story was told of some very old men that their long-dead sister had become a single mother and could not marry the father of the baby (because he was already married). The girl had three man-sized brothers, two older than she was, one younger. The brothers weren't especially big but they were strong. They went out to explain things to the man, even though his adulterous act had not apparently been violent. Nobody claimed to know how much of the explanation was accomplished by words, fists, or boots. Only the brothers really knew that, and they weren't telling. What was known was that the father of the baby got himself into a local mental hospital as a suicidal alcoholic, and spent the rest of his life there; and, in those days before welfare, the brothers paid for the care of the baby, and, having a sense of justice, of a pre-school-aged uncle on the father's side the baby happened to have. And their sisters, daughters, and granddaughters were respected by men.

Oates has presented the Mulvaneys as that kind of men, with that kind of instincts...so what's wrong with the lot of them? Southern readers might be forgiven for saying, “Well, they're Northerners,” but the news media show us Southern men reacting to evildoers in their midst as feebly as the Mulvaney men do.

Marianne finds an inadequate solution for herself. Though brought up Protestant, she starts going to a Catholic church, trying to “offer up” and spiritualize her suffering. This is about as effective a short-term coping strategy for Marianne's emotions as going to a psychiatrist and taking tranquilizers might be. The emotions continue to “process” through Marianne's body and mind, for years rather than weeks, while she merely copes with her own feelings, and meanwhile the facts are that the boy who got away with raping her goes on to rape their other little school friends. Marianne obsesses with her own guilt feelings—she said no to the actual rape but she had been drinking and flirting with someone else's date, at the party—and, by choosing the most “spiritual, unselfish” way of dealing with those feelings, she deals with the rape in an altogether selfish way that offers no benefit to others. That might be some part of her menfolks' problem...that whole idea of ignoring the facts, denying responsibility for the community (“Some branch of the government should take care of these things”), and obsessing with one's own individual emotions (“You are the part of the situation you can control”). Is Psychology—clinical psychology treated not as a way to help sick patients become responsible adults, but as a way to enable responsible adults to behave like sick patients—what ruins the Mulvaneys?

The Mulvaneys started out as a Christian family, although the way they relate to their faith certainly changes, if they keep their faith at all, through the course of the novel. Do they go to one of those churches that exaggerate and misconstrue the distinction between Christ's forgiveness and God's justice, and end up preaching passivism? Do they blame themselves for not having nice, happy emotional feelings about the rapist in their community, consciously, while an inherent human instinct is telling them that they deserve blame for letting a rapist live in their community? If this story had been told as true, I'd be inclined to suspect that this heretical passivist perversion of Christianity is what's wrong with the Mulvaneys. Christianity is not a socially dysfunctional religion, but passivism preached in the name of Christianity is one.

If this story had been told as true I'd wonder to what extent it identifies the use of alcohol as what's wrong with the Mulvaneys. The same pattern of alcohol intolerance is found in almost equal majorities of the Irish and Native American populations. Both in Ireland and in North America, alcohol was deliberately used to put the leaders of indigenous communities at a disadvantage during negotiations. For the fictional Mulvaneys as for most Native American families and—although many deny it—for most Irish families, health equals sobriety. A healthy Mulvaney might drink a thimbleful of wine at Communion, no more. When any Mulvaney drinks more alcohol than that, major difficulties ensue.

Whatever might have saved them, this novel vividly depicts how a happy family becomes a scattered, dysfunctional family by allowing a rapist to continue in his evil ways. As the blurb on the back cover promises, Oates does show the Mulvaneys “reunit[ed] in the spirit of love and healing”--not really through a “miracle” so much as through Mr. Mulvaney's premature death, but the blurb writer can be forgiven for thinking Oates intended to create a fictional “miracle,” because she doesn't show us the healing process. We leap from the year Mr. Mulvaney dies to the year the four siblings finally meet at their mother's house and talk to each other. If Oates tried to write about what gets them from the former point to the latter point—talking with Judd?--whatever she wrote about that has been cut from the final story.

That's what's not to love about We Were the Mulvaneys, in the end. (Surely readers can forgive a novel for raising their blood pressure—although hypertensive people should avoid this one, because it'll keep your blood pressure up most of the way through the story, and it's a long story.) Oates is a very good writer; at times readers may want to hurry her through the process of bringing the early 1970s to life, but she does that well. We're persuaded through her skill that we're reading the story of a real family, or families, that might have become dysfunctional for different reasons than some family we know, but might be recovering its functionality in some way that might work for that family we know. We want to know just what that way of recovering might be. And that we're not told.

But of course, if the real family Oates had in mind were her own, she'd have no right to write about the real healing process even as she might have imagined it working in connection with a fictional crisis; if the real families she had in mind were not her own, she'd have no source of accurate inside information. I still think the lack of equally clear insight into the solution, after so much insight into the problem, is a major shortcoming of this novel, but I don't see a way Oates can be blamed for it.

Any book endorsed by Oprah Winfrey will sell enough copies to keep prices low for a good long time, but this is still A Fair Trade Book. Buy it here, rather than from other web sites that might offer lower prices, and of the $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment this web site will send $1 to Oates or a charity of her choice. At least two books of this size will fit into the package. Oates has written dozens, some as long as this one, some child-sized, and the way Fair Trade Books works is that if you buy two of her books together, you pay $15 (or $16 electronically) and Oates or her charity gets $2.