Before the film American Beauty, before Columbine, even before the Menendez brothers or JonBenet Ramsey became symbols of American suburban culture, Joyce Carol Oates had, in her fluid style, already shown the “dark side” of suburbia in American Appetites.

Indeed, Greg Johnson, in his book Understanding Joyce Carol Oates, simplifies Oates’s message and overall writing style, not only in American Appetites, but in her writing as a whole: “the phenomenon of contemporary America: its colliding social and economic forces, its philosophical contradictions, its wayward, often violent energies” (Johnson, 8).

Oates took the McCullough family—Ian, Glynnis, and daughter Bianca—and showed readers the potentially deep flaws just beneath the surface of suburbia. Outwardly perfect, all appearances are crisp and clean, yet boiling underneath this very thin surface is a tendency towards violence, infidelity, greed, and dishonesty.

The American dream, a quest for the perfect family, profession, and home and a life free of monetary concern, has been a popular topic for literature since F. Scott Fitzgerald graced the literary world with The Great Gatsby. In American Appetites, Joyce Carol Oates shows the American dream as a conclusion rather than a quest.

Although limited in number, critical analyses of American Appetites point to Oates’s commentary on suburbia as well as the “brittle fragility of the structures and institutions that shape the typical American lifestyle” (Creighton, 95). In addition to this viewpoint, American Appetites can also be read as Oates’s challenge of the meaning of truth, redefining it as shifting perception rather than an absolute certainty.

Ian and Glynnis McCullough, a successful, wealthy, and beautiful couple, truly have everything. The only apparent flaw in their picturesque world is the death of an infant son, Jonathan, many years prior to the opening of the novel. Ian is a successful senior fellow at the Institute for Independent Research in the Social Sciences. Glynnis is a published author and chef, currently working on a new cookbook entitled American Appetites. Their daughter Bianca, enrolled in a prestigious college, appears throughout the novel but does not live at home.

Oates quickly establishes the success and storybook life of the McCullough family. Just as readers are wondering what this perfect family will do for the next 300 pages, Ian receives a call from a young woman named Sigrid Hunt—a friend of Glynnis—sobbing and in desperate need of help.

“She began sobbing, panting harshly into the receiver, a warm moist desperate breath Ian could virtually feel” (10).

Her cryptic message draws Ian to her home in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she greets him in hysterics. She needs money. Ian is clearly sexually drawn to her, although he alternates repeatedly between denying and confirming his attraction. He writes her a check for $1,000 and leaves with the satisfaction that his money has helped someone less fortunate than himself.

“Ian McCullough drove back to Hazelton-on-Hudson in a trance that was both erotic and rueful: guessing that what he’d done might be a mistake but quite satisfied with himself that, against the grain of his natural caution, he had done it. He thought of himself, that February afternoon—to be specific, the afternoon of February 20, 1987—with satisfaction and, even, a measure of pride” (30).

Joyce Carol Oates

When Glynnis finds the check receipt, however, the McCullough family begins to unravel. Glynnis attacks Ian with accusations, and their fight escalates from verbal to physical. In an attempt to protect himself from a knife-wielding Glynnis, Ian accidentally pushes her through a plate-glass window. Her death following an 18-day hospital stay prompts an extensive police investigation, and Ian is charged with the murder of his wife. Although he is eventually acquitted of the charges, he spends the duration of the novel attempting not only to maintain the appearance of his perfect family, now missing a substantial third, but to determine if, in fact, he did kill his wife.

As a commentary on suburbia, American Appetites works as a near caricature.

“The suburban life the McCulloughs have been living is another game. What appear to be solid, respectable lives and faithful, happy marriages are only the civil trappings of a much different reality full of rage, infidelity, and desperation” (Creighton, 97).

Oates’s overemphasis of Glynnis as a professional woman, very successful in her career, a solid wife and mother who lives for her family yet is also able to put together the perfect dinner party for 20 of their “close” friends, belies the imperfection boiling underneath.

Ian, too, fits the stereotype of the perfect man to a degree, even while standing trial for his wife’s murder. Ian is seen as quite introspective, largely due to the point of view Oates selected. Through the trial, Ian constantly questions his own guilt, as any “good” person would.

“My success is my problem, he said, and his friends laughed with him and agree, for many of them were burdened with the same problem: they were, like Ian McCullough, successes ‘in their fields,’ well into middle age yet ‘still youthful,’ comfortably well off beyond all dreams and expectations of graduate-student days yet still ‘ambitious’—though ambitious for what, none could have said” (7).

However, with the realization that affairs happen, money is lost, and people die, American Appetites “is also about the other side of the looking glass, the ‘photographic negative,’ the dark other in the self and in others, which Ian encounters as a result of this experience” (Creighton, 95).

An unanalyzed yet equally significant message of American Appetites is the redefinition of truth Oates presents. Truth, as a concept, is considered reality in a relatively constant state. Oates amends the concept and suggests that reality itself shifts continuously. Both Ian and Glynnis explore the concept of truth versus perception at many points throughout the novel.

Glynnis thinks, while recollecting an affair from her past, “She had known, then, that absolute trust in another human being is an error. We believe, not what is true, but what we wish to perceive as true” (57).

Ian mirrors this through a piece of artwork that hangs in his office as a constant reminder: “Not what the eye sees but what the mind imagines the eye must see” (8). Through these two parallel viewpoints, Oates challenges readers to consider what is truth, fact, and what is perception—what our minds imagine our eyes see. Throughout the trial, Ian revisits this concept as he questions his role in Glynnis’s death.

American Appetites is still a relatively un-critiqued piece of literature. Through presenting the picture of a stereotyped “American Dream” family and redefining one of life’s basic accepted facts—the definition of truth—Joyce Carol Oates has once again demonstrated her ability to not only tell a story, but to give a telling analysis of society and humanity as well.

Sources
Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Johnson, Greg. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.
Oates, Joyce Carol. American Appetites. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.