them

Detroit’s Underclass

them (the lowercase title is intentional) opens in 1937 with Loretta Wendall, sixteen years old, waking up to find the boy she slept with shot dead in her bed. The novel never quite recovers from this opening — not because it becomes more violent, but because the casual brutality of that first scene establishes the register that governs everything that follows. The Wendalls are people to whom things happen, and then more things, and the question is whether they have any agency within that.

Oates follows Loretta’s son Jules and daughter Maureen through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Jules becomes a petty criminal with aspirations toward something bigger. Maureen becomes a student, then something darker. Both are intelligent, capable people trapped in a social structure that will not make room for them.

The Riot

The 1967 Detroit riot — one of the deadliest in American history, triggered by a police raid on an unlicensed drinking club — provides the novel’s climax. Oates wrote the book partly in response to the riot, which she witnessed at distance as a professor at the University of Windsor just across the Canadian border. The fiction is prefaced by an author’s note claiming the events are based on the letters and experiences of a real student — a device that blurs the boundary between novel and testimony.

them won the National Book Award in 1970. It remains Oates’s clearest statement of her central subject: what American violence does to American lives, particularly the lives of those for whom the country’s promises were never meant.

The Trilogy and Oates’s Early Career

them is the third novel in a loose thematic trilogy Oates wrote in the 1960s about the textures of American life and class — following A Garden of Earthly Delights, set among migrant farm workers, and Expensive People, a satire of suburban affluence. Where those books looked at the rural poor and the comfortable middle, them turns to the urban working class of Detroit, and it is the most ambitious and acclaimed of the three. Oates was barely thirty when it won the National Book Award in 1970, an early confirmation of the staggering productivity and seriousness that would make her one of the most prolific major American writers of the century. The novel announces the obsessions that recur across her enormous body of work: the proximity of desire and violence, the pressure of social structure on individual lives, and an unflinching attention to the people American literature usually overlooks.

Violence, Class, and the American Dream

The argument running beneath them is that poverty in America is not a temporary stumble but a structural position, reproduced across the Wendall generations no matter how hard Jules and Maureen strive to climb out. Oates refuses to separate the violence inside the family — the beatings, the abuse, the casual cruelty — from the larger violence of the social order that produces it; one is presented as an expression of the other. The American dream, in this telling, is differently available to different bodies, and the Wendalls keep running into its limits: Jules’s hustling ambition curdles into crime, Maureen’s bid for respectability is built on degradation she cannot speak of. The 1967 riot that climaxes the book is not an aberration but a culmination, the accumulated pressure of decades finally combusting.

The Documentary Conceit and the Prose

Part of what makes them unsettling is Oates’s framing device: an author’s note presenting the novel as drawn from the letters and confidences of a real former student named Maureen Wendall, deliberately blurring the line between fiction and testimony. The conceit lends the brutal events a documentary weight, as though the reader is being entrusted with real lives rather than invented ones. Oates’s prose moves between gritty social realism and a feverish, almost hallucinatory intensity, especially in the consciousness of her characters under stress; the style tightens and loosens to match the pressure of each scene. It is dense, demanding writing that rewards patience, and the Loretta sections in particular ask the reader to inhabit a perspective that offers little comfort.

Limitations

The length and density demand sustained engagement. Some readers find Loretta’s sections harder to inhabit than Jules or Maureen’s. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Reception, Legacy, and How to Read It

them secured Oates’s reputation almost overnight, winning the National Book Award and cementing her standing as a chronicler of American violence and class long before her later fame for the suburban tragedy of We Were the Mulvaneys or the Marilyn Monroe novel Blonde. Critics have continued to treat it as one of her essential books, a 1960s counterpart to the social novels of Dreiser and Dos Passos, attentive to the same economic machinery but filtered through a more interior, more violent sensibility. Modern readers should come to it prepared for length and density; this is an advanced, demanding novel that asks for sustained attention rather than casual reading. The reward is one of the most complete portraits of mid-century working-class America in the literature — a book that refuses easy uplift and earns its devastating finale. Readers who want to understand Oates’s lifelong preoccupations, or who simply want a major American novel about the lives the dream left behind, will find this an indispensable, if unsettling, place to spend five hundred pages.

Who This Is For

Serious readers of American literary fiction who want Oates at her most sustained and socially engaged.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Oates’s most sustained achievement of her first decade — a gritty, socially precise portrait of Detroit’s underclass across thirty years. The 1967 riot finale earns everything the novel has built.