Book summary

In upstate New York, the Mulvaneys are a wealthy and magnetic family--attractive, charismatic, promising. But after 25 years, the family begins to slide, then fragment, then shatter, and soon there is nothing left of the dynasty. Judd, the youngest of the clan, begins to search for the reasons behind the downfall, and as he uncovers family secrets, he begins to bring the Mulvaneys slowly back together in a spirit of healing and compassion.

Media reviews

"...[B]uilds on its biblical infrastructure (with a few nuts and bolts from Richardson's 'Clarissa') a world so richly observed and engagingly peopled that we're willing to sit still for yet another story of fall and redemption....Occasionally Ms. Oates's prose sounds canned and careless...but she gives us enough small luminous moments to carry several novels....'We Were the Mulvaneys' works not simply because of its meticulous details and gestures, or because 'family' is a hot-button issue these days, or because Ms. Oates has borrowed the primal narrative of Western culture to give her story subliminal oomph. Mere hard work and canny calculation could get a writer that far. What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is something stronger and spookier: her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something happening on the other side that we'd swear was life itself."