Them

Joyce Carol Oates's them follows members of a working-class family as they struggle to survive poverty and violence in Depression-era Ohio and mid-century Detroit.

In August 1937, sixteen-year-old Loretta Botsford stands before a mirror in a small Ohio canal city, dreaming of Saturday night. She works at a laundry and lives with her unemployed, alcoholic father and her twenty-year-old brother Brock, who carries a gun he refuses to explain. On her way to visit a friend, Loretta encounters Bernie Malin, a handsome neighborhood boy who persuades her to come to a party. She brings him home and they sleep together. Before dawn, a gunshot jolts her awake: Brock has shot Bernie in the head and fled. Alone with the body and paralyzed with terror, Loretta runs barefoot to a friend's house for help, then encounters Howard Wendall, a young man recently hired as a police officer. Howard sees the body, declares Bernie "got what he deserved," and implies he will arrange for the body to be found elsewhere. He has sex with Loretta in the kitchen, establishing a claim over her. Pregnant and with nowhere to turn, Loretta marries him.

The couple settles near Howard's domineering mother, Mama Wendall, who exerts fierce control over the household and the new baby, Jules. When Howard is suspended from the police force for involvement in a kickback scheme, Mama Wendall orchestrates a move to a run-down farm in the country. Loretta is miserable. She gives birth to a daughter, Maureen, and becomes pregnant again before Howard leaves for World War II.

Jules grows up wild on the farm, running away at age six, setting a barn on fire, and suffering nightmares after witnessing a man's sheared skull at a plane crash. His grandmother whips him until he bleeds. Loretta, yearning for the city, announces she is leaving. After a confrontation with Mama Wendall, she takes the children by bus to Detroit, where she rents a room above a funeral parlor. On her first afternoon, she attempts to solicit a man on the street and is immediately arrested.

The narrative follows the children as they grow up in Detroit's inner city. At fifteen, Jules reads a Time magazine article about Indian mystic Vinoba Bhave while waiting at a clinic. The words "Fire merely burns . . . Fire burns and does its duty" lodge permanently in his mind. Jules works multiple jobs, dreams of wealth, and narrowly survives being chased and pistol-whipped by a policeman. Meanwhile, Howard is killed at work when a load of steel casings falls on him. Jules feels a flash of satisfaction at his freedom.

Maureen grows up cautious and orderly, finding refuge in the public library. Loretta remarries, this time to Pat Furlong, a truck driver with a volatile temper who tries to befriend Maureen, though she despises and fears him. At sixteen, a change comes over Maureen. She begins secretly approaching men in cars after school, selling her body and hiding the money between the pages of a poetry book. One afternoon, Furlong spots her in a stranger's car. When she comes home, he has found the money. He beats her so savagely that she is left unconscious on the floor.

Maureen falls into a catatonic state lasting thirteen months, lying in bed unresponsive while the world continues around her. Loretta's long-lost brother Brock reappears and moves in, reading Maureen the comics, brushing her hair, and talking to her for hours, slowly drawing her back to consciousness. Letters arrive from Jules, who has drifted through Texas and Oklahoma working odd jobs. One day Maureen calls out to the mailman, asking if there is a letter from Jules. She has awakened for good.

Jules, now eighteen, becomes the chauffeur and protégé of Bernard Geffen, an unstable, wealthy man who showers him with checks and promises of college. At Bernard's sister's home in the wealthy Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, Jules catches sight of Bernard's niece, Nadine Greene, and is instantly transfixed. Days later, Jules finds Bernard dead with his throat slit and flees on foot.

Months later, Jules tracks Nadine down, and an intense connection forms. She begs him to take her to Mexico. They steal a car and flee south, but Nadine refuses any physical intimacy. In Texas, Jules falls violently ill. When he wakes, Nadine and the car are gone. Jules spends years drifting through the South and Southwest, working degrading jobs, before returning to Detroit, where he encounters Nadine again. She is now married and living in the affluent suburb of Bloomfield Hills. They begin an affair, but Nadine grows increasingly anguished, speaking of guns, blood, and death. One morning she pulls a gun from her pocket and shoots Jules in the chest.

Jules survives but enters a hollowed-out state, drifting through Detroit with no pleasure or pain. He collects money from Vera, a young woman he has put on the streets as a prostitute, and is loosely connected to Mort Piercy, a radical sociology professor running a government-funded antipoverty program.

Meanwhile, two letters from Maureen to her former teacher "Miss Oates" at the University of Detroit reveal her recovery and hardened pragmatism. She declares that novels are lies and has chosen to pursue Jim Randolph, her married night-school teacher, because his wife and three children prove his stability. She intends to take him from his family by force of will. Jim, a kind but exhausted graduate student, is unable to resist Maureen. His wife confronts Maureen directly, but Maureen refuses to give him up.

On July 23, 1967, the Detroit riot erupts. Jules wanders for days through burning streets, riding with armed strangers who fire at buildings indiscriminately. A policeman chases him into a florist's shop and attacks him. Jules fights back and, in a decisive act, shoots the man in the face. He feels that something essential has been restored in him. During the riot, Loretta's apartment is firebombed and she loses everything. At a shelter, she watches a television program and sees Jules on screen, wild-eyed, declaring that "fire burns and does its duty" and that the fires will never be put out. She recognizes with horror that her son has killed someone and weeps uncontrollably.

In the final chapter, Jules visits Maureen at her new apartment in Dearborn, a Detroit suburb, where she is pregnant and married to Jim. He tells her he is leaving for California with Mort and plans to go into real estate, adding that he still hopes to return and marry Nadine, the woman who shot him. Maureen refuses to let him inside and says she wants to forget everything about her past. Jules gently warns her: "Sweetheart, aren't you one of them yourself?" He tells her that her new suburban life can also burn down, that the past is never truly escaped. Maureen presses her hands against her ears. Jules kisses his sister's hand, makes an ironic bow, and departs for California, declaring that his life is only beginning now.