We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
Published 1996 · 170,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Family Saga
How hard is We Were the Mulvaneys to read?
We Were the Mulvaneys scores 29 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 30 out of 100
- Accessible, middle-American prose reflecting the Mulvaneys' world. Oates avoids literary ostentation in favor of emotional directness.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Judd's narration is conversational and flowing. Sentences are long but not syntactically demanding — they build through accumulation.
- Abstraction: 25 out of 100
- The novel stays close to the concrete textures of family life. Its ideas about American innocence emerge from domestic detail.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- A long, deliberately paced novel. The density is emotional rather than informational — Oates takes time to render each character's interior life.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- Judd narrates retrospectively, which creates some temporal complexity, but the story is told with relative straightforwardness.
- Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
- The farm, the animals, the Valentine's Day dance — recurring images function symbolically but without heavy-handedness.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- Oates writes with deep empathy for the Mulvaneys. Judd's narration is suffused with nostalgia and grief rather than irony.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- The novel moves toward a family reunion that provides qualified closure. Each character's fate is accounted for.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Retrospective narration spanning two decades, organized around each family member's arc. Complex in scope but not in technique.
How We Were the Mulvaneys is regarded
We Were the Mulvaneys holds a literary regard score of 59 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.