Novel: Them

Overview

Them is a raw, panoramic novel set in mid-20th-century Detroit that traces the unraveling of working-class lives caught between harsh economic forces and personal desperation. Joyce Carol Oates follows several generations of a family and the wider community around them, dramatizing how poverty, violence, and fractured dreams corrode intimacy and morality. The novel moves between documentary intensity and lyrical interiority, mapping both public decay and private grief.

Plot and Structure

The narrative unfolds in linked episodes rather than a single continuous plot, moving from small domestic scenes to larger social moments, factory floors, street corners, cheap apartments, and bars. Early chapters sketch family origins and the pressures of urban migration and industrial labor; later sections center on a young woman and her children as they struggle to keep afloat amid unemployment, crime, and unstable relationships. Interwoven vignettes follow the children into adolescence, where encounters with brutality, juvenile delinquency, and sexual danger escalate the stakes and culminate in devastating consequences that underline the tragic costs of systemic neglect.

Characters and Relationships

Characters are drawn as both particular individuals and types shaped by economic and cultural forces. Mothers and daughters face limited options: work that pays little, men whose attachments are unreliable, and neighborhoods where violence is normalized. Young men in the novel are often pulled into petty crime and more serious offenses, searching for identity and power where legitimate avenues for success are blocked. Intimate relationships are frequently strained or exploitative, and familial bonds are tested by grief, betrayal, and the everyday grind of survival.

Themes

The central themes include social disintegration, the persistence of violence, and the failure of the American Dream for large swaths of the urban poor. Oates interrogates how class, gender, and environment interact to shape destiny, suggesting that structural forces, deindustrialization, prejudiced institutions, and economic precarity, produce individual pathologies as much as personal moral failings. The novel also explores the allure and danger of escape: ambition, sex, and small acts of rebellion offer moments of promise but often lead to further harm when set against an indifferent society.

Style and Tone

Oates employs a muscular prose that alternates between stark reportage and lyrical psychological insight. Scenes can be claustrophobic and relentless, emphasizing sensory detail, the clang of factories, the squalor of living rooms, the suddenness of violence, while interior passages probe fear, yearning, and shame. The narrative voice balances empathy with unsparing observation, refusing sentimental redemption and instead insisting on a bleak realism that compels readers to confront uncomfortable truths about modern urban life.

Legacy and Impact

Them solidified Joyce Carol Oates's reputation as a major literary voice by combining social critique with an unflinching exploration of character. Its depiction of urban decay and the moral complexities of survival resonated with readers and critics, influencing subsequent American fiction concerned with class and degradation. The novel remains a powerful, often harrowing study of how social structures and personal choices intersect to shape lives, and it continues to be read as a significant examination of 20th-century American dislocation.