Expensive People Read Free Page A

that's the end. Like letting a garden go to weeds.”
    Although his delicate, blond daughter Clara is pretty and intelligent, she can envision no routes out of her environment but stealing and sex; the pregnant female bodies that repel Carleton are her un-escapable destiny. As a little girl, she dreams of becoming a teacher, but the teacher calls her “white trash.” As a young teenager, she tells Lowry, a mysterious blond man with a sharp profile like the jack of spades, “I don't know what I want, but I want it!” In her powerlessness, Clara gambles on Lowry because he provides an immediate means of escape, even though she has no plan or destination.
    Part II is named for Lowry, although he remains a shadowy and enigmatic character. A drifter and a loner, Lowry likes “just to be in motion”; he likes his car, and the act of driving. But he “don't stay in one place long.” He takes Clara along as his passenger, helps her find a room and a job in his hometown of Tintern, New York (a version of Lock-port), and eventually takes her virginity, in a scene where Clara, although willing, “felt as if he had gone after her with a knife.” Although Clara knows by this point that she doesn't want to get married (“You just end up having babies”), she falls back into the ancient scenario; shebecomes pregnant, Lowry leaves, and she is forced to deploy her resources of female sexuality, beauty, and cunning in order to survive.
    In her most self-determining act, Clara seduces a prosperous married businessman, Curt Revere, and persuades him that he has fathered her child. “Today she changed the way her life was going and it was no accident.” In another sign of Clara's partial taking of control, Revere teaches her to drive and buys her a car. Clara finally has wheels but nowhere to go, and she imagines that her infant son, Swan, will grow up to live out her fantasies: “He's going by train and by airplane / All around the world,” she croons to the sleeping baby.
    But Swan too is doomed. In part III we meet Swan as a teenager, bookish and intense, an artist manque, but ultimately a failure who seeks manhood and control in a gun, and destroys himself. Clara's fate is to watch endlessly as her fantasies play in their most elemental form on television: “She seemed to like best programs that showed men fighting, swinging from ropes, shooting guns and driving fast cars, killing the enemy again and again until the dying gasps of evil men were only a certain familiar rhythm away from the opening blasts of the commercials which changed only gradually over the years.” While this passage from the original text of the novel is overtly satirical about the mindless violence and repetition of television, it is also a terse and tragic image of Clara's helpless identification with male combat, vengeance, and death.
    In 2002, Oates expanded this passage, along with rewriting more than three-quarters of the rest of the book. Among the changes, she restored some of the language that had been thought too obscene in 1967 and added details about Clara trying to copy the styles of movie stars, so that she more emphatically takes on the characteristic of the iconic Blonde, the vehicle and victim of American cultural fantasies, about whom Oates would write throughout her career with great compassion.
EXPENSIVE PEOPLE (1968)
    Published at the height of the counterculture and antiwar movement,
Expensive People,
Oates has recalled in her Afterword to the book, was received by critics “as an expression of the radical discontent… of a generation of young and idealistic Americans confronted by an Americaof their elders … steeped in political hypocrisy.” Set in “Fern-wood,” an imaginary Detroit suburb, the novel is Oates's most playful and experimental black comedy of the '60s, and is linked to the other Wonderland novels more by its fascination with place, identity, and power than by its political concerns. The people of the story are