In her twenty-sixth novel, WE WERE THE MULVANEYS, Joyce Carol Oates
weaves an intricate and detailed story of a family growing together
only to grow apart. It's a moving family saga that tracks nearly
forty years of successes and tragedies.  

Michael and Corrine Mulvaney are the parents of four glorious
children: three boys, Michael, Patrick and Judd, and one girl,
Marianne. They live on a picture perfect farm in upstate New York.
Michael Mulvaney owns a successful roofing company, and Corrine is
a bubbly, earthy mom who can always be counted on to do the
motherly thing. For nearly twenty years the Mulvaney clan does
nothing but blossom.

And then they don't.  

On St. Valentine's night, 1976, after Marianne Mulvaney is named
one of the "maids-in-waiting" at the prom, she goes to a party
where she inadvertently drinks a great deal and is raped by an
upperclassman.

When the rape is revealed, Marianne refuses to press charges
against the student (whose father is a well respected businessman,
and a friend of Marianne's own father). She feels she can't be her
own witness because she had been drinking and the entire night had
turned into a blur.  

Marianne's rape is the beginning of an ugly spell of bad luck that
does nothing but accelerate over a fifteen-year period. Her
unwillingness to press charges leaves her father lost and angry. He
can no longer look his daughter in the face and she is soon sent
away to live with an aunt. Marianne spends years hoping that her
father will ask for her. He never does. The circumstances of her
life become haphazard as she moves from place to place, with
virtually no support, economic or otherwise, from her
family.  

Back on the farm, things continue to get worse. All three of the
Mulvaney boys leave home angrily, never to return. Michael
Mulvaney's casual drinking increases and turns into full-fledged
alcoholism. Gradually, his reputation as a respected businessman
disintegrates: The Mulvaneys are cornered into bankruptcy and
forced to sell the one thing that kept the illusion of family going
for years --- the farm.

This is a long book, more than 450 pages, but it is by no means a
slog. I stayed up till two in the morning turning pages as fast as
I could, with tears streaming, to find out the fate of the
Mulvaneys. I'm giving nothing away by saying that there is indeed a
healing. The Mulvaney family comes full circle: anger subsides and
love is restored.  

Ms. Oates, who is childless, dedicates her novel to "my" Mulvaneys.
But you don't need to have a large family to appreciate this
emotionally charged story. For Joyce Carol Oates is a truly gifted
storyteller who artfully handles multi-charactered and
multi-layered pieces of fiction. An extraordinary woman of letters,
Ms. Oates has also authored twenty-one volumes of short stories and
more than a dozen works of non-fiction. This, combined with her
twenty-five previous novels, adds up to more than fifty books by a
fifty-seven-year-old woman.  

WE WERE THE MULVANEYS is yet another example of her astounding
literary presence.