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Title: Spare Me More Oates
Review: It is hard to say what I found more more irritating -- this tedious and overwrought saga of the most boring family since "Father Knows Best," or Joyce Carol Oates ability to describe paint dry in fourteen pages or more. WHERE was the story? How are we to believe that any family, especially one brimming with such simple-minded goodness as her Mulvaneys, would so unanimously and wordlessly banish their "beloved" daughter because she was date-raped? (or was she? this too is vague) How long is the reader expected to believe (or care) that this family's absent-minded sort of denial be considered plausible as a storyline? Is this neverending story meant to "explain" the father's alcoholism?? Does the family, perhaps, just implode from pure shallowness? If Joyce Carol Oates were to participate with actual humans someday, she might not, so desperately, need to lavish her endless windblown vocabulary on such superficial fiction as this.
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