40
PARTISAN IliVIEW
with a Charlie Tuna camera, polystyrene dump trucks and guns, a
Bakelite yo-yo with a frayed string, a one-legged l3arbie doll, tiny
useless hands raised in supplication, a desk lamp in the form of a
translucent goose, acrylic rulers, a partial set of pale yellow discolored
melamine plates, an atom bomb sal tshaker, a wame iron, a candy box
half-filled wi th thread-jammed buttons, a loom of pop-it beads, three
empty flashlights, a sagging box of Polonia clarions and a stack of old
78s.
Joyce Carol Oates, who in twenty-s ix
novels
has already tried out
every
fictional mode, has been alternately embraced and rejected by
votaries of a feminist literary consciousness. Her newest,
We Were the
Mulvaneys,
is a
novel
of traditional form, a family chronicle, though with
female experience at its center. Hers, too, like Proulx's, is the story of the
dissolution of a dream, in this case the dream of the lovingly united
American family
living
untroubledly at the heart of American communi–
ty. Their small eccentricities are no problem to the Mulvaneys; they add a
note of humor to the bland
tv
serial of their days. They
live
in a tasteful–
ly restored (painted lavender!) "storybook house" in the Chautauqua
Valley, and everything is hunky-dory: Mr. Mulvaney is a rising roofing
contractor who has been admitted to the Country Club despite his lower–
class Irish origins, and Mom's fey personality could not be more
endearing; she conducts an unserious antique business in the barn, rarely
selling anything because she falls in
love
with the items she has scrounged
in second-hand shops. The eldest son is the high school football star. The
middle son is the brightest boy in his class, the future valedictorian. The
nicest of "nice girls" daughter Marianne is a cheerleader
everyone loves .
Into this Eden comes catastrophe. MariarUle returns home after a
school dance having been raped by one of her classmates in his car. And
from this moment the life of the Mulvaneys becomes past tense. Marianne
is unwilling to testify against her assaulter, and her father gets arrested
when he tries to
visit
his fury upon this popular son of a respected fami–
ly. Mulvaney's friendships wi ther; his business founders; he drinks more
and more
heavily.
He no longer can
even
bear the sight of his favorite
child, and she is cruelly exiled to
live
with a distant cousin. The
Mulvaneys
move
out of the town which has reje cted them. Revenge upon
the rapist is later achieved by the bright son who abandons his college
studies to waylay his sister's destroyer and nearly murder him. But
Marianne, humbly unresentful, drifts gently on, working first in a student
commune, then in an animal hospi tal whose director she marries.
In
the
end, the family is united though fatherless .
