"them" by Joyce Carol Oates: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 02:28, 16 April 2026

them is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, published in 1969 by Vanguard Press. Set explicitly in Detroit, the novel follows the Wendall family across three decades, from the 1930s through the 1967 Detroit riots, tracing the cycles of poverty, violence, and fractured hope that define their lives. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1970.^[1] Critics recognized it as one of the most unflinching portraits of working-class American life published in the twentieth century, and it remains a central text in both Oates scholarship and the American urban novel tradition.

Background and Composition

Oates wrote them while living and teaching in the Detroit area. She joined the faculty of the University of Detroit in 1961 and later taught at the University of Windsor across the river in Ontario, a position she held until 1978.^[2] Her years in Detroit gave her direct exposure to the city's working-class neighborhoods, its racial tensions, and the grinding economic pressures that would shape the novel's world. She has described Detroit as one of the most powerful influences on her fiction.

The novel grew, in part, from a real encounter. In the author's note that prefaces them, Oates writes that a student she identifies only as "Maureen Wendall" shared her family's history with Oates in a series of letters and conversations. Oates presents this as the seed of the novel, positioning herself as a character within the text — a professor named "Miss Oates" — and framing the story as a fictionalized account of true events. This device complicates the novel's status as pure fiction, incorporating autobiographical and documentary elements that place it in an unusual position between realism and autofiction. The author's note reads in part: "This is a work of history in fictional form — that is, in personal perspective, which is the only kind of history that exists."^[3]

The late 1960s were a period of acute social crisis in the United States. Civil rights legislation had passed, but enforcement remained contested and violent. Anti-war protest was intensifying. Detroit itself had been the site of one of the deadliest urban uprisings in American history: the 1967 Detroit riot, which left 43 people dead, more than 1,000 injured, and vast stretches of the city burned.^[4] Oates finished them in the aftermath of that event, and the riots appear directly in the novel's final section. The novel's publication in 1969 placed it squarely within a national conversation about urban inequality, race, and the limits of the American Dream.

Plot

them is divided into three parts, each named for its central character. The novel opens in the late 1930s with Loretta Botsford, a teenager living in a Detroit neighborhood who witnesses a murder in her bed — her boyfriend is shot by her brother — and whose life pivots irreversibly from that moment. She marries Howard Wendall, a man ill-suited to stability, and they begin producing children: Jules, Maureen, and Betty. Howard drifts through jobs and moods; Loretta drifts through men. The family moves repeatedly through Detroit's poorer districts, never finding footing.

The second part centers on Maureen, Loretta's daughter, who becomes perhaps the novel's most internally rendered character. Maureen is studious and desperate to escape the family's disorder, but she is drawn into prostitution as a teenager to save money for a life she imagines elsewhere. When her stepfather, Furlong, discovers her savings, he beats her so severely she retreats into a catatonic state for nearly a year. It is during her recovery that she begins writing letters to a professor — Miss Oates — which form one of the novel's structural pillars.

Jules, Loretta's son, drives the third section. He's charming, restless, and drawn to the idea of transformation. He falls into criminal activity, survives violence, falls in love with a woman named Nadine who shoots him and then herself, and eventually emerges as a participant in the 1967 Detroit riots. The riots are portrayed not as political awakening but as a kind of inevitable eruption — the city burning because there was nothing left to hold it together. Jules survives and moves to California. Maureen, by the novel's end, has married a married man to extract herself from Detroit, slipping into a suburban life with deliberate, almost cold calculation. Neither escape is triumphant. Both carry the weight of everything that came before.

Characters

Loretta Wendall is the novel's matriarch and its opening narrator. She's vivid, impulsive, and often infuriating — a woman who survives by adapting rather than resisting. Her choices consistently harm her children, though she's rarely aware of this. She functions, in part, as a portrait of a certain kind of American optimism: cheerful, shallow, and ultimately unable to reckon with the consequences of her own life.

Jules Wendall is Loretta's eldest son. He embodies the American myth of self-invention — the young man who believes he can talk or hustle his way into a better life. Oates tracks his ambitions from adolescence through the riots, and his arc suggests that the myth itself is the problem: that the belief in individual reinvention blinds Jules, and people like him, to the structural conditions that constrain them.

Maureen Wendall is arguably the novel's moral and psychological center. Her sections are the most inward, the most precise, and the most disturbing. Her eventual escape into suburban domesticity has been read by critics both as a form of survival and as a kind of spiritual defeat — she gets out, but what she becomes is its own kind of diminishment.^[5]

Miss Oates appears as a character within the novel, primarily in Maureen's letters. Her presence is deliberately ambiguous — she's at once a confessor figure, a representative of a world the Wendalls can't access, and a reminder that the story is being shaped and filtered by someone outside the family's experience.

Detroit Setting

them is set entirely in Detroit and its immediate surroundings. The city isn't simply backdrop — it's a structural force in the novel, shaping what the characters can imagine for themselves. Oates traces the family's geography across Detroit's working-class west-side neighborhoods, through rooming houses and cramped apartments, past shuttered factories and corner bars. The physical decline of the city over the novel's thirty-year span mirrors the family's own inability to gain traction.

The 1967 Detroit riots occupy the final movement of the novel and represent its most directly historical passage. Oates depicts the fires and the chaos not through the eyes of officials or journalists but through Jules, who moves through the burning streets with a kind of exhilaration he can't entirely explain. The riots in the novel are presented as the logical outcome of decades of displacement, poverty, and containment — not an aberration but a culmination.^[6]

Detroit was undergoing significant deindustrialization during the period the novel covers. The postwar boom had drawn hundreds of thousands of workers to the city's auto plants, but by the late 1950s and 1960s, automation and suburban relocation of manufacturing had begun hollowing out those jobs. The white flight that followed white working-class families into the suburbs left behind increasingly segregated and economically isolated neighborhoods. The Wendalls exist in the middle of this process — white and poor enough that they don't benefit from the racial geography of suburbanization, stuck in neighborhoods that the city's economic logic was abandoning.^[7]

Reception

them received strong reviews on publication. The novel was named among the New York Times Best Books of the Year for 1969.^[8] In 1970, it won the National Book Award for Fiction, one of American publishing's most prestigious honors. The award citation recognized the novel's ambition and its willingness to confront the realities of American poverty and urban life without sentimentality.^[9]

Scholarly reception has been substantial. Joanne V. Creighton, in her 1979 study of Oates' fiction, identified them as the culmination of what she called Oates' "Detroit trilogy," noting that the novel achieved a synthesis of social realism and psychological intensity that Oates' earlier work had been building toward.^[10] Eileen Teper Bender's Joyce Carol Oates: Artist in Residence (1987) examined the role of Oates' Detroit years in shaping the novel's geography and politics, arguing that the city's specific character — its industrial heritage, its racial divisions, its particular relationship to the American myth of mobility — was essential to the novel's meaning rather than incidental to it.^[11]

The novel's reputation has held. In 2026, it appeared on the longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction, introduced to a new generation of readers alongside contemporary fiction.^[12]

Themes

The novel's central preoccupation is entrapment — the question of whether individuals born into poverty and violence can actually escape, or whether escape is itself a kind of illusion. Each of the three Wendall children attempts to break free. None of them fully succeeds. Jules gets out of Detroit but carries the city's violence with him. Maureen escapes into domesticity, but what she leaves behind is the question of who she might have been. Loretta never really tries to escape — she adapts, survives, and doesn't notice what's been lost.

Violence runs through the novel not as spectacle but as atmosphere. It's domestic, routine, and largely unpunished. Men hit women. Women absorb it or redirect it. Children learn that the world is a place where bodies are vulnerable and justice is theoretical. This isn't exaggerated — Oates is precise about it, and the precision is what makes it hard to dismiss.

The novel also takes seriously the question of women's lives in mid-century America. Loretta and Maureen both find themselves constrained by the same basic reality: their options are defined by the men available to them. Marriage, for both of them, is less a romantic institution than a survival strategy. Oates doesn't romanticize this or editorialize about it — she simply shows it, repeatedly, until the pattern becomes undeniable.^[13]

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-Published in 1969, Joyce Carol Oates’ novel *them* explores the complexities of urban life and familial relationships through a multi-generational narrative, earning a National Book Award in 1970<ref>{{cite web |title=Them |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/them-novel-by-Oates |work=britannica.com |access-date=2026-02-25}}</ref>. The story centers on the Wendall family and delves into themes of violence and societal alienation, offering a stark portrayal of American life. While not explicitly set in a single, named city, the novel’s depiction of urban struggles resonates with the realities of post-industrial cities like [[Detroit]], making its exploration of these themes relevant to the city’s historical and cultural context.
+''them'' is a novel by [[Joyce Carol Oates]], published in 1969 by Vanguard Press. Set explicitly in [[Detroit]], the novel follows the Wendall family across three decades, from the 1930s through the 1967 Detroit riots, tracing the cycles of poverty, violence, and fractured hope that define their lives. It won the [[National Book Award for Fiction]] in 1970.<ref>{{cite web |title=National Book Awards – 1970 |url=https://www.nationalbook.org/national-book-awards/years/1970/ |work=nationalbook.org |access-date=2026-02-25}}</ref> Critics recognized it as one of the most unflinching portraits of working-class American life published in the twentieth century, and it remains a central text in both Oates scholarship and the American urban novel tradition.
-== History ==
+== Background and Composition ==
-*them* emerged during a period of significant social and political upheaval in the United States. The late 1960s were marked by civil rights movements, anti-war protests, and a growing sense of disillusionment with traditional American values<ref>{{cite web |title=Them |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/them-novel-by-Oates |work=britannica.com |access-date=2026-02-25}}</ref>. Oates’ novel reflects this atmosphere of unrest, presenting a fragmented and often disturbing vision of American society. The novel's publication coincided with a period of economic decline in many American cities, including Detroit, which was grappling with deindustrialization, racial tensions, and urban decay.
-The novel’s innovative narrative structure, incorporating multiple perspectives and a shifting timeline, was notable for its time. Oates experimented with form, allowing different characters to narrate sections of the story, offering a multifaceted view of the Wendall family’s experiences. This technique, alongside the novel’s unflinching portrayal of violence, contributed to its critical acclaim and its recognition with the National Book Award. The author’s note included with the book further adds to the meta-narrative, blurring the lines between fiction and reality<ref>{{cite web |title=them |url=https://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-them/ |work=bookrags.com |access-date=2026-02-25}}</ref>.
+Oates wrote ''them'' while living and teaching in the Detroit area. She joined the faculty of the [[University of Detroit]] in 1961 and later taught at the [[University of Windsor]] across the river in Ontario, a position she held until 1978.<ref>{{cite web |title=Joyce Carol Oates |url=https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joyce-Carol-Oates |work=britannica.com |access-date=2026-02-25}}</ref> Her years in Detroit gave her direct exposure to the city's working-class neighborhoods, its racial tensions, and the grinding economic pressures that would shape the novel's world. She has described Detroit as one of the most powerful influences on her fiction.
-== Culture ==
+The novel grew, in part, from a real encounter. In the author's note that prefaces ''them'', Oates writes that a student she identifies only as "Maureen Wendall" shared her family's history with Oates in a series of letters and conversations. Oates presents this as the seed of the novel, positioning herself as a character within the text — a professor named "Miss Oates" — and framing the story as a fictionalized account of true events. This device complicates the novel's status as pure fiction, incorporating autobiographical and documentary elements that place it in an unusual position between realism and autofiction. The author's note reads in part: "This is a work of history in fictional form — that is, in personal perspective, which is the only kind of history that exists."<ref>{{cite book |last=Oates |first=Joyce Carol |title=them |publisher=Vanguard Press |year=1969 |location=New York}}</ref>
-*them* offers a complex and often bleak portrayal of American family life, exploring themes of poverty, violence, and social alienation. The novel’s characters struggle with issues of identity, belonging, and the search for meaning in a seemingly chaotic world. Loretta Wendall, the central figure of the novel, embodies the challenges faced by women in a patriarchal society, navigating multiple relationships and raising children in difficult circumstances<ref>{{cite web |title=Them Joyce Carol Oates 1960 |url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/them |work=encyclopedia.com |access-date=2026-02-25}}</ref>.
-The novel’s exploration of urban life is particularly striking. Oates depicts a world of crowded streets, dilapidated housing, and social unrest, reflecting the realities of many American cities during the 1960s. The sense of anonymity and isolation experienced by the characters underscores the challenges of living in a large, impersonal urban environment. The narrative’s focus on the experiences of marginalized individuals – those living in poverty, struggling with mental illness, or facing discrimination – highlights the social inequalities that pervade American society. The novel’s willingness to confront uncomfortable truths about American life contributed to its controversial reception, but also cemented its place as a significant work of American literature.
+The late 1960s were a period of acute social crisis in the United States. Civil rights legislation had passed, but enforcement remained contested and violent. Anti-war protest was intensifying. Detroit itself had been the site of one of the deadliest urban uprisings in American history: the [[1967 Detroit riot]], which left 43 people dead, more than 1,000 injured, and vast stretches of the city burned.<ref>{{cite web |title=Detroit 1967 |url=https://www.detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/detroit-1967 |work=detroithistorical.org |access-date=2026-02-25}}</ref> Oates finished ''them'' in the aftermath of that event, and the riots appear directly in the novel's final section. The novel's publication in 1969 placed it squarely within a national conversation about urban inequality, race, and the limits of the American Dream.
-== Neighborhoods ==
+== Plot ==
-While *them* does not explicitly name a specific city as its setting, the novel’s depiction of urban environments evokes the atmosphere of cities undergoing significant social and economic change, such as Detroit. The descriptions of crowded neighborhoods, decaying infrastructure, and the struggles of working-class families resonate with the experiences of residents in many post-industrial cities<ref>{{cite web |title=Them |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/them-novel-by-Oates |work=britannica.com |access-date=2026-02-25}}</ref>. The sense of fragmentation and alienation experienced by the characters could be interpreted as a reflection of the social and spatial divisions that characterized many American cities during the 1960s.
-The novel’s exploration of family dynamics and intergenerational trauma also speaks to the challenges faced by communities grappling with social and economic decline. The Wendall family’s history is marked by violence, poverty, and instability, reflecting the cyclical nature of disadvantage that often affects marginalized communities. The characters’ struggles to overcome these challenges underscore the resilience and determination of individuals living in difficult circumstances. The novel’s portrayal of urban life is not simply a depiction of despair, but also a testament to the enduring human spirit.
+''them'' is divided into three parts, each named for its central character. The novel opens in the late 1930s with Loretta Botsford, a teenager living in a Detroit neighborhood who witnesses a murder in her bed — her boyfriend is shot by her brother — and whose life pivots irreversibly from that moment. She marries Howard Wendall, a man ill-suited to stability, and they begin producing children: Jules, Maureen, and Betty. Howard drifts through jobs and moods; Loretta drifts through men. The family moves repeatedly through Detroit's poorer districts, never finding footing.
-== Notable Residents ==
+The second part centers on Maureen, Loretta's daughter, who becomes perhaps the novel's most internally rendered character. Maureen is studious and desperate to escape the family's disorder, but she is drawn into prostitution as a teenager to save money for a life she imagines elsewhere. When her stepfather, Furlong, discovers her savings, he beats her so severely she retreats into a catatonic state for nearly a year. It is during her recovery that she begins writing letters to a professor — Miss Oates — which form one of the novel's structural pillars.
-The novel focuses on the lives of Loretta Wendall and her family, spanning multiple generations<ref>{{cite web |title=30. them (Joyce Carol Oates) |url=https://yearsofreadingvoraciously.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/30-them-joyce-carol-oates/ |work=yearsofreadingvoraciously.wordpress.com |access-date=2026-02-25}}</ref>. Loretta is the central figure, navigating complex relationships and raising children amidst challenging circumstances. Her sons, Jules and Maureen, also play significant roles in the narrative, each grappling with their own personal demons and contributing to the family’s complex history. The novel also features a diverse cast of supporting characters, representing a cross-section of American society.
-The narrative structure of *them* introduces an unnamed character who acts as an observer and occasional narrator, further complicating the story’s perspective. This character’s presence adds a layer of ambiguity and invites readers to question the reliability of the narrative. The novel’s focus on the internal lives of its characters, rather than external events, creates a sense of intimacy and allows readers to connect with their struggles on a personal level. The characters’ motivations and actions are often ambiguous, reflecting the complexities of human behavior and the challenges of making sense of a chaotic world.
+Jules, Loretta's son, drives the third section. He's charming, restless, and drawn to the idea of transformation. He falls into criminal activity, survives violence, falls in love with a woman named Nadine who shoots him and then herself, and eventually emerges as a participant in the 1967 Detroit riots. The riots are portrayed not as political awakening but as a kind of inevitable eruption — the city burning because there was nothing left to hold it together. Jules survives and moves to California. Maureen, by the novel's end, has married a married man to extract herself from Detroit, slipping into a suburban life with deliberate, almost cold calculation. Neither escape is triumphant. Both carry the weight of everything that came before.
+== Characters ==
+'''Loretta Wendall''' is the novel's matriarch and its opening narrator. She's vivid, impulsive, and often infuriating — a woman who survives by adapting rather than resisting. Her choices consistently harm her children, though she's rarely aware of this. She functions, in part, as a portrait of a certain kind of American optimism: cheerful, shallow, and ultimately unable to reckon with the consequences of her own life.
+'''Jules Wendall''' is Loretta's eldest son. He embodies the American myth of self-invention — the young man who believes he can talk or hustle his way into a better life. Oates tracks his ambitions from adolescence through the riots, and his arc suggests that the myth itself is the problem: that the belief in individual reinvention blinds Jules, and people like him, to the structural conditions that constrain them.
+'''Maureen Wendall''' is arguably the novel's moral and psychological center. Her sections are the most inward, the most precise, and the most disturbing. Her eventual escape into suburban domesticity has been read by critics both as a form of survival and as a kind of spiritual defeat — she gets out, but what she becomes is its own kind of diminishment.<ref>{{cite book |last=Creighton |first=Joanne V. |title=Joyce Carol Oates |publisher=Twayne Publishers |year=1979 |location=Boston |pages=60–75}}</ref>
+'''Miss Oates''' appears as a character within the novel, primarily in Maureen's letters. Her presence is deliberately ambiguous — she's at once a confessor figure, a representative of a world the Wendalls can't access, and a reminder that the story is being shaped and filtered by someone outside the family's experience.
+== Detroit Setting ==
+''them'' is set entirely in Detroit and its immediate surroundings. The city isn't simply backdrop — it's a structural force in the novel, shaping what the characters can imagine for themselves. Oates traces the family's geography across Detroit's working-class west-side neighborhoods, through rooming houses and cramped apartments, past shuttered factories and corner bars. The physical decline of the city over the novel's thirty-year span mirrors the family's own inability to gain traction.
+The 1967 Detroit riots occupy the final movement of the novel and represent its most directly historical passage. Oates depicts the fires and the chaos not through the eyes of officials or journalists but through Jules, who moves through the burning streets with a kind of exhilaration he can't entirely explain. The riots in the novel are presented as the logical outcome of decades of displacement, poverty, and containment — not an aberration but a culmination.<ref>{{cite web |title=Detroit 1967 |url=https://www.detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/detroit-1967 |work=detroithistorical.org |access-date=2026-02-25}}</ref>
+Detroit was undergoing significant deindustrialization during the period the novel covers. The postwar boom had drawn hundreds of thousands of workers to the city's auto plants, but by the late 1950s and 1960s, automation and suburban relocation of manufacturing had begun hollowing out those jobs. The [[white flight]] that followed white working-class families into the suburbs left behind increasingly segregated and economically isolated neighborhoods. The Wendalls exist in the middle of this process — white and poor enough that they don't benefit from the racial geography of suburbanization, stuck in neighborhoods that the city's economic logic was abandoning.<ref>{{cite book |last=Sugrue |first=Thomas J. |title=The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit |publisher=Princeton University Press |year=1996 |location=Princeton}}</ref>
+== Reception ==
+''them'' received strong reviews on publication. The novel was named among the [[New York Times]] Best Books of the Year for 1969.<ref>{{cite web |title=The New York Times Best Books of the Year, 1969 |url=https://www.librarything.com/award/95.0.0.1969/The-New-York-Times-Best-Books-of-the-Year-1969 |work=librarything.com |access-date=2026-02-25}}</ref> In 1970, it won the [[National Book Award for Fiction]], one of American publishing's most prestigious honors. The award citation recognized the novel's ambition and its willingness to confront the realities of American poverty and urban life without sentimentality.<ref>{{cite web |title=National Book Awards – 1970 |url=https://www.nationalbook.org/national-book-awards/years/1970/ |work=nationalbook.org |access-date=2026-02-25}}</ref>
+Scholarly reception has been substantial. Joanne V. Creighton, in her 1979 study of Oates' fiction, identified ''them'' as the culmination of what she called Oates' "Detroit trilogy," noting that the novel achieved a synthesis of social realism and psychological intensity that Oates' earlier work had been building toward.<ref>{{cite book |last=Creighton |first=Joanne V. |title=Joyce Carol Oates |publisher=Twayne Publishers |year=1979 |location=Boston |pages=55–80}}</ref> Eileen Teper Bender's ''Joyce Carol Oates: Artist in Residence'' (1987) examined the role of Oates' Detroit years in shaping the novel's geography and politics, arguing that the city's specific character — its industrial heritage, its racial divisions, its particular relationship to the American myth of mobility — was essential to the novel's meaning rather than incidental to it.<ref>{{cite book |last=Bender |first=Eileen Teper |title=Joyce Carol Oates: Artist in Residence |publisher=Indiana University Press |year=1987 |location=Bloomington |pages=44–62}}</ref>
+The novel's reputation has held. In 2026, it appeared on the longlist for the [[Women's Prize for Fiction]], introduced to a new generation of readers alongside contemporary fiction.<ref>{{cite web |title=We are thrilled to reveal the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction longlist |url=https://www.facebook.com/womensprize/posts/we-are-thrilled-to-reveal-the-2026-womens-prize-for-fiction-longlist-described-a/1525970529535780/ |work=Women's Prize for Fiction |access-date=2026-02-25}}</ref>
+== Themes ==
+The novel's central preoccupation is entrapment — the question of whether individuals born into poverty and violence can actually escape, or whether escape is itself a kind of illusion. Each of the three Wendall children attempts to break free. None of them fully succeeds. Jules gets out of Detroit but carries the city's violence with him. Maureen escapes into domesticity, but what she leaves behind is the question of who she might have been. Loretta never really tries to escape — she adapts, survives, and doesn't notice what's been lost.
+Violence runs through the novel not as spectacle but as atmosphere. It's domestic, routine, and largely unpunished. Men hit women. Women absorb it or redirect it. Children learn that the world is a place where bodies are vulnerable and justice is theoretical. This isn't exaggerated — Oates is precise about it, and the precision is what makes it hard to dismiss.
+The novel also takes seriously the question of women's lives in mid-century America. Loretta and Maureen both find themselves constrained by the same basic reality: their options are defined by the men available to them. Marriage, for both of them, is less a romantic institution than a survival strategy. Oates doesn't romanticize this or editorialize about it — she simply shows it, repeatedly, until the pattern becomes undeniable.<ref>{{cite book |last=Oates |first=Joyce Carol |title=them |publisher=Vanguard Press |year=1969 |location=New York}}</ref>
 == See Also ==
-* [[Detroit history]] – The novel’s themes of urban decay and social unrest resonate with Detroit’s historical experiences.
+* [[1967 Detroit riot]] – The uprising depicted in the novel's final section
-* [[African American history in Detroit]] – The novel’s exploration of social inequality and marginalization is relevant to the experiences of African Americans in Detroit.
+* [[Detroit history]] – Historical context for the novel's urban setting
-* [[Post-industrial America]] – *them* provides a fictionalized portrayal of the challenges faced by cities undergoing economic decline.
+* [[African American history in Detroit]] – The racial geography that shapes the novel's world
+* [[Post-industrial America]] – The economic transformation that forms the novel's backdrop
-{{#seo: |title="them" by Joyce Carol Oates — History, Facts & Guide | Detroit.Wiki |description=Explore Joyce Carol Oates' novel "them," its historical context, cultural impact, and relevance to cities like Detroit. |type=Article }}
+* [[National Book Award for Fiction]] – The award ''them'' received in 1970
 [[Category:Literature of Detroit]]
 [[Category:American novels]]
+[[Category:1969 American novels]]
+[[Category:National Book Award for Fiction winners]]
+[[Category:Joyce Carol Oates]]
+[[Category:Novels set in Detroit]]