Rating: 
Summary: A wonderful, moving novel
Review: It is often said that tragedy brings people and families closer together...WE WERE THE MULVANEYS is a true example of this adage. The Mulvaneys are a close, loving family living an idyllic life on a farm in a small, upstate New York town, until "Button" Mulvaney, the only daughter, is the victim of a terrible crime against her. As the Mulvaneys desperately try to cover up the incident, the family, once so popular in the town are vilified by their friends and neighbors, and torn part, until they become strangers to each other. One final, tragic incident serves to bring the shattered family back together, providing an ultimate and uplifting redemption. WE WERE THE MULVANEYS is a grand, satisfying family saga, with unforgettable characters that we come to care for as deeply as if they were one's own family.
Rating:
Summary: I wish I could give it 6 stars
Review: This is one of the best books I've ever read. Oates really makes you care about the Mulvaneys; you start to think these are real people, not fictional characters. You feel for them even as you get angry at what they do to each other and to themselves. I'm so glad I read this book! If you haven't read it, buy it now! You won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Sublime Characterization
Review: This is one of Oates' tightest and strongest of her recent novels,and it all stems from her masterful characterizations. At first it is hard to believe that there are parents who would treat a child in this manner, especially after Oates sets the Mulvaneys up on their pastoral, idyllic farm. The fact that Corrinne chooses her husband over her daughter is an interesting spin on Corrinne's character. It would have been easier for Oates to write a sterotypical mother, but here we have a very problematic character precisely because she instills anger in the reader. We want to judge her for what she allows to happen to her daughter because it is truly a terrible thing, never mind the era in which the Mulvaneys lived. Bravo to Oates for giving us characters with enough depth that they make us think about how we would have handled their situations.
Rating: 
Summary: A Family Undone
Review: Denial and dysfunction tears apart an American family in Joyce Caorol Oates' We Were the Mulvaneys. Set in 1970's upstate New York, the tale centers around the Mulvaneys - a family who is living the American dream of wealth and prominence on their own little slice of heaven, High Point Farm. Using her considerable gift for visceral prose, Oates paints a painful portrait of the fall of the Mulvaneys after the rape and subsequent exile of their "perfect" daughter. Oates' understanding potrayal of violence and its depersonalizing effects compels the reader to stay with the Mulvaneys -to empathize with their defects and come to a place of forgiveness with the entire clan. This is Oates at her best: holding a mirror up to show our strengths and vulnerablilities.
Rating: 
Summary: I think it's a parody
Review: This book has lots of enticing parallels to Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: three brothers in distress over the fall from innocence of a beloved sister. Mule Mulvaney the athlete is nicely parallel to Jason Compson the tough businessman, Patrick Mulvaney the scientist gone off to Cornell to Quenton Compson the sensitive son gone off to Harvard. Is it possible that our narrator Judd is also parallel to the youngest Compson son Benjy, the idiot by whom the tale of sound and fury is initially told?It's tempting to think so. Because then he would be an untrustworthy narrator and I wouldn't have to believe what he tells us about these people. When reading Joyce Carol Oates, I always have the feeling that she must have her tongue way in her cheek. She's pulling our legs but keeping a very straight face. Look at the ending here: Mom's hair has become silver glinting like mica - a crown. Patrick the bitter bookworm turned terrorist is now a perfect California boy with a great arm for slow pitch softball. Wounded and wild Marianne has been domesticated by the Horse Whisperer - who proposes while euthanizing her beloved old cat. And of course, like Christ, Daddy has died for all our sins and we can all be the perfect Mulvaneys again. Surely this can't be serious.
Rating:
Summary: Another Masterpiece from Oates
Review: At this point, all the griping (blatant jealousy?) from the literary establishment on the subject of Oates' prolific output is not only tired, it is an outright travesty. Why criticize a writer for being productive, especially when she is imminently capable of turning out such masterpieces as this, a work that was surely deserving of a Pulitzer or National Book Award, if not a mass audience. Having purged her overtly Gothic urges in the simultaneously published "First Love", the author here is free to spin a family saga of the traditional variety (none of Bellefleur's hallucinogenic excursions here)and to prove, yet again, that when she chooses to work within a stricly naturalistic setting, she is the equal of any writer today. The members of the Mulvaney family are living, breathing human beings, beset by insecurities, self-destructiveness, consuming ambition and tragedy, but also possessing of that undying hope that keeps them moving on, looking to the future, surviving. Despite its great length and complicated plot twists, the novel flows organically, spinning out to its controversial "happy ending", an ending that, in my estimation, is not only earned, but necessary. The Oates of We Were the Mulvaneys is an Oates who is no longer quite so focused on the underside of life, who is willing to see that salvation lurks behind every brutal encounter, every twist of fate. Her vision here is all-embracing and, at times, overwhelming. With nary a false step, she has created an entire world, a world that mirrors our own, yet is transcendant in its humanity, in its tangled, rough beauty.
Rating:
Summary: A Rather Frustrating Read
Review: Although the story is captivating, it just takes forever for Ms. Oates to tell it. The reader ends up knowing more detail about the characters than they probably know about themselves. After wading through it all, the ending is rather rushed and disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: Down and Out on the Farm
Review: Is it possible that such a strong, capable family could disintegrate over date rape? Yep - I guess in J.C. Oatesland it happens. In the 1990s I suppose everyone would be in intensive family therapy, but this novel is set in a time when rape did reflect on the victim. I disagree with readers who have said the family was just too perfect for the first 100 pages. Haven't we all known of families filled with high achievers? My disappointment with the book was that Judd was not as strongly characterized as his brothers and sister. In spite of that, this novel was a page-turner. Reading Oates' books makes me feel as though I've picked up a rock from the garden and looked underneath. In other words, she writes great fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Pace yourself for this family marathon-finish line is superb
Review: The Mulvaneys inexplicably hold themselves up to higher standards than mere mortals--and have to pay with their lives for this arrogance. This is a compelling group of characters, mother, father, and four children, that will stamp themselves in your physce long after you put the novel down. I was mesmerized throughout but was awed by the epilogue--a truly satisfying end to a rich, complex novel.
Rating:
Summary: Moving quickly and violently within a family, love contains.
Review: Marianne, the cheerleader and lovable peace-maker in the Mulvaney's, brings the family to doom and destruction through a violent and terrifying experience. The family acts as victims powerless in their approach to this heinous crime committed to their sweet daughter. Joyce Carol Oates shows how each member of the family through distinctly unique methods express their feelings toward the crime, the criminal and the victim. The Mulvaney's show more passion in punishing the perpretrator then consoling the victim. One of the most tender scenes occurs when Muffin, Marianne's dying cat, succumbs in her arms. And her friend, later her husband, relates that Muffin was not the only one that loved her. The Mulvaney's through unending love and pride in themselves triumph to come together in the closing. This family faces life so realistically that you can see it happening to you.
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