Books: The Doomed and the Damned

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EXPENSIVE PEOPLE by Joyce Carol Oates. 308 pages. Vanguard. $5.95.

Bat cries in the night, cobwebs on the tower stairs—all the exquisitely accumulated gothic horrors—these are the forte of frail, large-eyed women novelists. Joyce Carol Oates, a brilliant writer, offers an updated variation on the genre by taking the American Dream and turning it into a kind of American nightmare.

Expensive People, the middle volume of a trilogy that began with A Garden of Earthly Delights, spooks the suburban-castle country of the upper middle class. Author Oates has but one message in her demonic little tale: behind the suburban facade lie corruption and madness. To hear her tell it, American husbands and wives are nice clean-cut vampires planting stakes in each other's hearts. And there is always the monster in the playroom.

The monster of Expensive People is a gross 18-year-old named Richard Everett with an IQ of 161 and a neurosis to match every one of his 250 pounds. In a memoir that sometimes reads like Compulsion as told by Holden Caulfield, Richard wanders through his traumatic childhood, concentrating upon his twelfth year when he blossomed out as a child murderer.

Mother is Nada Romanov, "a minor but famous writer" who collects lovers. Father is a high-trapeze-act executive, swinging smoothly from one corporation vice-presidency to another. Both are moral and parental failures. But both, like Richard, are victims as well as executioners.

Like most gothic romancers, Author Oates puts her really sinister touches of evil into her stage setting rather than her characters. The villain in the end is that old devil, bad environment. Trapped in an imitation-British boys' school among 13-year-old alcoholics—wizened little gnomes like himself—Richard joins his parents a little prematurely as one of the "doomed" and "damned."

If only Miss Oates were content to be just a modern romancer—to go all the way with her unnerved vision. Her trouble is that she seems to regard her book variously as a black-humor exercise, a parable of national sickness of heart, and, worst of all, a realistic piece of social reportage. Too cool for fantasy, too hysterical for imagination, Expensive People says too little half the time, and too much the other half.