Expensive People

Expensive People is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates first published in 1968 by Vanguard Press. A Fawcett Publications paperback edition was issued in 1974.
The novel is the second in Oates's Wonderland Quartet including A Garden of Earthly Delights, them, and Wonderland.

Plot

Expensive People is told by an unreliable first-person narrator, the eighteen-year-old Richard Everett, who opens his "memoir" with the entry: "I was a child murderer."

Reception

New York Times literary critic John Knowles congratulates Joyce Carol Oates for undertaking a project fraught with "technical problems" that challenge "her literary imagination and her talent," but with some success. The use of a first-person confessional narrative Mr. Knowles regards as a "powerful and tricky concoction." The novel's narrator, the 18-year-old and self-confessed murderer, Richard Everett, "digresses to give us his views on art, writing, imagery, puns, you, me, and so on." The reviewer confesses, self-mockingly, that the precocious protagonist wrote his review.

Retrospective appraisal

In tone and style, Expensive People is a "striking departure" from Oates's fiction to that date. Abandoning the third-person omniscient examination the focal character, the novel is postmodernist, presented as a memoir by an unreliable narrator.
Literary critic Greg Johnson identifies the novel as a "contemporary Gothic satire" in the style of Vladimir Nabokov, and an "exploration of American culture." Johnson remarks on the comic elements of the novel:

Theme

Terming the novel a "naturalist allegory" and a "tour-de-force," biographer Joanne V. Creighton locates its thematic center:
Oates goes so far with self-parody as to portray her protagonist consulting and critiquing one of her essays, "Building Tension in the Short Story".