In upstate New York, the Mulvaneys are a wealthy and magnetic family--attractive, charismatic, promising. But after 25 years, the family begins to slide, then fragment, then shatter, and soon there is nothing left of the dynasty. Judd, the youngest of the clan, begins to search for the reasons behind the downfall, and as he uncovers family secrets, he begins to bring the Mulvaneys slowly back together in a spirit of healing and compassion.

"...[B]uilds on its biblical infrastructure (with a few nuts and bolts from Richardson's 'Clarissa') a world so richly observed and engagingly peopled that we're willing to sit still for yet another story of fall and redemption....Occasionally Ms. Oates's prose sounds canned and careless...but she gives us enough small luminous moments to carry several novels....'We Were the Mulvaneys' works not simply because of its meticulous details and gestures, or because 'family' is a hot-button issue these days, or because Ms. Oates has borrowed the primal narrative of Western culture to give her story subliminal oomph. Mere hard work and canny calculation could get a writer that far. What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is something stronger and spookier: her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something happening on the other side that we'd swear was life itself."             -- David Gates

"...[I]t is hard to avoid the simple fact that, like anything we have in too great a number--late summer squash, back issues of the 'New Yorker'--Oates's books are easy to undervalue. It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate 'We Were the Mulvaneys'....Oates unspools this expansive story, and captures this memorable clan, with a huge amount of exacting yet unfussy energy. the busy spill of her sentences is a perfect match for the tumble of big-family life....[I]t will consume you."
-- Dwight Garner

"Joyce Carol Oates is just a fearless writer. Where others tremble and falter, she plunges right in and does not look up or come to shore until the fullest telling of the tale, the most thorough examination of the direst possibilities, the most exacting testing of ordinary assumptions and theories, have been played out. 'We were the Mulvaneys' is yet new testimony to her great intelligence, certainly, but, more important, to her brave heart and her impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers."
-- Beverly Lowry

"Just when you think Oates has finally run dry, or is mired in mechanical self-repetition, she stuns you with another example of her essential kinship with the classic American realistic novelists. Dreiser would have understood and approved the passion and power of 'We Were the Mulvaneys'."

Everyone knows the Mulvaneys: Dad the successful businessman, Mike the football star, Marianne the cheerleader, Patrick the brain, Judd the runt, and Mom dedicated to running the family. But after what sometime narrator Judd calls the events of Valentine's Day 1976, this ideal family falls apart and is not reunited until 1993. Oates's (Will You Always Love Me, LJ 2/1/96) 26th novel explores this disintegration with an eye to the nature of changing relationships and recovering from the fractures that occur. Through vivid imagery of a calm upstate New York landscape that any moment can be transformed by a blinding blizzard into a near-death experience, Oates demonstrates how faith and hope can help us endure. At another level, the process of becoming the Mulvaneys again investigates the philosophical and spiritual aspects of a family's survival and restoration. Highly recommended.

Elegiac and urgent in tone, Oates's wrenching 26th novel (after Zombie) is a profound and darkly realistic chronicle of one family's hubristic heyday and its fall from grace. The wealthy, socially elite Mulvaneys live on historic High Point Farm, near the small upstate town of Mt. Ephraim, N.Y. Before the act of violence that forever destroys it, an idyllic incandescence bathes life on the farm. Hard-working and proud, Michael Mulvaney owns a successful roofing company. His wife, Corinne, who makes a halfhearted attempt at running an antique business, adores her husband and four children, feeling "privileged by God." Narrator Judd looks up to his older brothers, athletic Mike Jr. ("Mule") and intellectual Patrick ("Pinch"), and his sister, radiant Marianne, a popular cheerleader who is 17 in 1976 when she is raped by a classmate after a prom. Though the incident is hushed up, everyone in the family becomes a casualty. Guilty and shamed by his reaction to his daughter's defilement, Mike Sr. can't bear to look at Marianne, and she is banished from her home, sent to live with a distant relative. The family begins to disintegrate. Mike loses his business and, later, the homestead. The boys and Corinne register their frustration and sadness in different, destructive ways. Valiant, tainted Marianne runs from love and commitment. More than a decade later, there is a surprising denouement, in which Oates accommodates a guardedly optimistic vision of the future. Each family member is complexly rendered and seen against the background of social and cultural conditioning. As with much of Oates's work, the prose is sometimes prolix, but the very rush of narrative, in which flashbacks capture the same urgency of tone as the present, gives this moving tale its emotional power. 75,000 first printing; author tour.

Moving away from the sometimes dark and harrowing tone of her more recent novels, including "Zombie" and "What I Lived For", Oates's storytelling takes a profound and luminous turn in a tale that spans 25 years in the life of one American family--its rise, fall, and ultimate redemption. "It will consume you".--"The Washington Post Book World".