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Title: Doesn't quite add up
Review: I'm a medium-sized fan of Oates—American Appetites and Because it is Bitter, Because it is My Heart are favorites. But this saga misses the boat a bit. It never seems logical, or even probable that the father would exile his daughter for being raped. Though this book is set in the 1970s, it feels more like a 1950s morality tale. It takes that "things fall apart, the center cannot hold" thing too far, making a seemingly ideal family go from Leave it to Beaver perfection to the mean, wacked out folks they become due to one incident...terrible as it may have been. ... I kept reading and reading and was left dissapointed by the end. Like some romance novelist, Oates sews everything neatly up. If the Mulvaneys got that messed up by the earlier rape, they probably won't keep their stuff together either.
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