Expensive People Read Free Page B

“expensive,” rather than rich; their luxury comes at the cost of their children, servants, and rejected past.
    Expensive People
is narrated by Richard Everett, an obese, half-crazed adolescent living at “4500 Labyrinth Drive,” who is obsessed with his mother, the glamorous novelist Natashya Romanov, whom he calls “Nada”—nothing. Although she claims to be an aristocratic Russian emigre, Nada is actually a self-reinvented figure from a working-class family in upstate New York. Oates foregrounds some of the parallels between Nada and herself; Nada is considering plots and titles for the very first-person novel we are reading; and her embedded short story, “The Molesters,” is one that Oates published the same year in the
Quarterly Review of Literature.
    Oates's biographer, Greg Johnson, suggests that
Expensive People
is partly her dark autobiographical “dialog with herself about the prospect of motherhood.” * As Oates herself remarked, “not even Nabokov could have conceived of the bizarre idea of writing a novel from the point of view of one's own (unborn, unconceived) child, thereby presenting some valid, if comic, reasons, for it remaining unborn and unconceived.”t Richard is an angry and neglected son who comes to feel that he is only a “minor character” in his mother's life.
    Oates's concern, however, is as much with the conflict of creativity and procreativity for the woman writer as with actual motherhood, and her dialogue is as much with Nabokov and the aesthetic school of fiction as with herself. Throughout the 1960s and early '70s, Nabokov was the novelist Oates most frequently invoked as the epitome of the pure aesthetician who writes with no purpose but delight in language. While living in Detroit, she has said, she “was galvanized to believe that the writing of a novel should be more than purely private, domestic, or even, contrary to the reigning Nabokovian imperatives of the day, apolitical and aesthetic” (Afterword to
A Garden of Earthly Delights).
In
The Anxiety of Influence,
Harold Bloom has argued that strong artists repress the writers who most tempt them to imitation, and perhaps Oates herself was unaware of her attraction to Nabokov's art. Her hint that “the most immediate model for the novel's peculiar tone was evidently Thomas Nashe's
The Unfortunate Traveler…
my narrator alludes to
'that other unfortunate traveler
from whom I have stolen so much,' “ is misleading if not a deliberate leg-pull. In her Afterword, she does kindly tip-off the eager reader-detective that she herself in re-reading Nashe “can see only occasional and glancing similarities.” In fact, Richard Everett often sounds like the perverse narrator of Nabokov's
Lolita,
Humbert Humbert, in his unfortunate travels across the United States.
    Along with false clues, Nabokovian chess games, fake historical notes, mock-English houses and mock-English prep schools, and themes of bingeing and purging (one character eats himself to death), the novel features puns and literary parodies, especially an extended one of the
Partisan Review,
called
The Transamerican Quarterly.
The editor of this journal, a “professional intellectual” named Moe Malinsky who is brought to Fernwood by the Village Great Books Discussion Club, is a greedy snob and hypocrite, who brags of meeting Princess Margaret and fighting Norman Mailer, and stuffs himself on the canapes while condemning the suburban lifestyle. Oates's comments on the
Review,
via Richard, are merciless: “the magazine gives you a general frontal headache,” with its articles on Soviet economic growth and the decline of American art. Nabokovian literary games and labyrinths may be apolitical, Oates seems to suggest, but they are much more interesting than socialist realism.
    Matricide is an extreme solution to the dilemma of the Female Gothic. Oates acknowledged in her Afterword that “the novel's thinly codified secret” was “the execution of an ambitious