American Appetites

American Appetites is the 19th novel by Joyce Carol Oates first published in 1989 by E. P. Dutton and reprinted by Harper and Row in 1990.

Plot

The narrative is presented from a third-person point-of-view, with Ian the focal character. The novel is set in the fictional Hazleton-on-Hudson, N.Y., a community that resembles Princeton, New Jersey.
The middle-aged couple, Ian and Glynnis McCullough, are upper-middle-class academics, who live in an affluent and cohesive neighborhood. Ian is a senior fellow at the prestigious Institute for Independent Research in Social Sciences. Glynnis is a gourmet and writer of ethnic food recipe books. Married for 26 years, the couple travel in the circles of the academic elite and enjoy entertaining friends. They have one child, a college-aged daughter.
Ian is interrupted at his office by a phone call from a dancer, Sigrid Hunt, an acquaintance of Glynnis, whom he hardly knows. Distraught, Sigrid tells Ian she is pregnant by her Egyptian boyfriend who has threatened to kill her if she seeks an abortion. Dismayed but sympathetic, Ian gives her a $1000 check for the procedure; she promises to reimburse him. Intending to share the episode with Glynnis, Ian delays and, preoccupied with other matters, never tells her.
Months later, Glynnis discovers the cancelled check and instantly suspects the worst. That afternoon she begins to drink, and when Ian arrives home she has worked herself into a jealous rage, accusing him of infidelity. Despite assurances of his innocence, she divulges that she has had extramarital affairs. The confrontation escalates until Glynnis lunges at Ian with a kitchen knife; he reacts by shoving her through a plate glass window in which her skull is fractured. Glynnis survives in a coma for several weeks before dying. Ian is charged with second-degree murder. The ramifications of Ian’s indictment on his community, the trial and the reaction from the mainstream press constitute the latter and major part of the book.
Ian’s last-minute acquittal is achieved through the testimony of Sigrid who has emerged from hiding. Sigrid testifies she never had an affair with the defendant and praises Ian’s humane intervention.

Reception

Noting that Oates’s “virtuosity seems inevitably linked to her productivity,” critic Robert Towers notes Oates’s masterful handling of her characters, singling out Glynnis’s dinner party—“a set piece”—as “expertly sustained” and “conducted with admirable pacing and a wealth of appropriate detail.”
Towers attributes his “disengagement” from the novel by “the very abundance of information about his thoughts and moods with which we are presented” as well as “the elaborate blandness of the novel's style.”

Theme

Representing “the best of civilized virtues” Ian and Glynnis exemplify the “prototypical American success story.”
The title of the novel is derived from a cookbook Glyniss is preparing for publication: American Appetites.
The McCulloughs and friends find themselves vaguely troubled by their existence, rather than content, having achieved the American Dream. Hunger has been eradicated, and mere appetite will not suffice. Biographer Joanne V. Creighton writes:
American appetites cloak “baser emotions, unmet needs…unfulfilled souls.”
Los Angeles Times literary critic Mae Briskin observes that “American Appetites” is notable for its lack of scenes depicting violence.
That which is sinister or “evil” is suggested in the title:
Oates describes a social layer that suffers lives isolated from “the world outside them, where there is real, persistent, physical hunger.” The appetites the McCulloughs enjoy condemns them to existences that are “bland, deprived, devoid of either commitment or genuine love.”