With the tide We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates places the emphasis of her novel on how the family creates itself within the environment of a socially mobile and often violent twentieth-century America. Michael Mulvaney, Sr., the disowned son of an Irish steelworker from Pittsburgh, and Corinne Hausmann, a farm girl from upstate New York, have married and settled on picture-perfect High Point Farm in Mount Ephraim, New York. Here they have been successfully raising their family of four, integrating their life on the farm with their life in a town that has recognized Michael's success in the business community by inviting him to join the local country club. Michael has "reimagined himself as a small-town American businessman who owned property, had money and influence, was 'known' and 'liked' and 'respected' in his community.

He'd been a loner in his late adolescence, and was now...