Miss Oates' third novel—Expensive People (1968)—was a radical departure from the social milieu and gritty realities of her first books. By that I mean, the world of Richard Everett [the narrator] is as much a "fiction" as the fiction he self-consciously tries to write. The result is a parody of the reflexive mode, a book about the making of such books. It is also a Nabokovian romp in the art-and-craft of confessional narration…. As in all novels built upon the structural principle of Chinese boxes, the inter-locking frames are apparently endless. Richard Everett's highly personal reading of "The Molesters" (a story Miss Oates originally published in The Quarterly Review of Literature) reduces it to the level of biographical allegory; Miss Oates' comments about Expensive People are an exercise in a similar brand of impressionism. Both imply partial truths, but when "authors" multiply dizzyingly, readers quickly learn the virtues of skepticism. (p. 89)
Ironies generate from the considerable gaps between [Richard Everett's] narrative intention and its fictive result. Put another way: Richard's account of suburban malaise is an exercise in simultaneously calling tensions into existence and then declaring them inoperative. (p. 90)
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