Wonderland Read Free Page B

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.
    E XPENSIVE P EOPLE (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 America of their elders … steeped in political hypocrisy.” Set in “Fernwood,” 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 “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 émigré, 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 actually 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.” † 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 rereading Nashe “can see only occasional and glancing similarities.” In fact, Richard Everett often sounds like the perverse narrator of Nabokov’s
Lolita
, Humbert