He does not feel comfortable with the crowd, but while there he notes a boy that he mistakes at a distance for Zachary Lundt. Since the 1970s, population movement has been away from cities: while suburbia once constituted those towns adjacent to a large city, suburban sprawl has driven housing into what was once farmland. When they were first married, Corinne and Michael Mulvaney spent their time with a rowdy crowd at the Wolf's Head Inn, owned by "Haw" Hawley. Neither realizes then that this moment marks the end of innocent life at High Point Farm, which is, after the rape, clouded with secrets, suspicion, guilt, and anger. According to The Washington Post, the advertisement led figures in right-wing media, such as Fox News, to refer to Mulvaney in "disparaging and often in transphobic terms nearly a dozen times over the next three days".

a handsome athlete; Patrick, a science prodigy; Marianne, a sweet apprentice homemaker; and Judd, the earnest little Mulvaney caboose whom everyone, distractedly, loves.

was a football star, Marianne was a cheerleader, Patrick had top academic honors, and Judd, born considerably later, was the treasured youngest of the family. He takes him deep into a nearby swamp, where Lundt falls under water and is about to drown before Patrick realizes that he does not want to kill his worst enemy.

The 1990s was also the decade that saw the "year of the woman" prompted by the Thomas-Hill hearings, in which Anita Hill did not get use of the "master's voice" as Thomas did. At a Fourth of July family reunion, uncles, cousins, mother, children, and grandchildren gather, and the missing father is hardly registered. Coincidentally, the television documentary film Thomas Jefferson: A View from the Mountain, which brought to general public attention Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemings and the living descendents of that affair, aired in 1995, a year before Oates's novel was published. After traveling several hours, though, Marianne finds that she does not have it in herself to enter the chapel: she watches from outside and sees her mother and Judd, but neither of her other brothers or her father. After that, Marianne finds herself ostracized: first at school, where she is treated as though she is promiscuous, and at home, where her father is unable to come to grips with his own failure to protect her.The western part of the state is mostly rural, with more in common culturally with the farmlands of Pennsylvania and Indiana than with life in New York City.

Judd becomes an agile, broadly empathetic storyteller, entering the minds of his parents and siblings, sometimes even referring to himself in the third person. The family members have nicknames; they have a coded way of talking that hints at things left unsaid; and for their values, the Mulvaneys look to each other, leaving them slightly puzzled by the world at large. Oates makes it clear, through the information she gives about his childhood and early courtship of Corinne, that Michael's behavior, though triggered by his realization that he cannot protect his daughter, is in his nature all along. Garner finds that the book's subject justifies Oates's style: "The busy spill of her sentences is a perfect match for the tumble of big-family life. The aftermath of the event drives different family members into isolation, alcoholism, and a revenge scheme that includes kidnapping and murder.Significantly, Marianne's mother knows where to find the dress, and she disposes of it without a word to Marianne, allowing her daughter to fixate in a self-punishing mental state. The epilogue offers refreshing hope for both the reader and the Mulvaneys, but the novel certainly makes you work for it. He is a senior, the same age as Patrick and a year older than Marianne, when she catches his eye at the Valentine's dance, and he offers to drive her home when her date has to leave early.

It makes sense that the Mulvaney family identity would be attractive to Judd, since he looks at it as an outsider; the family identity is constructed to respond to outsiders best. By now it's become trite to exclaim at the length of Oates' books, or at the sheer abundance of them.In October 2022, Mulvaney appeared with genderfluid hairstylist David Lopez in a podcast for the cosmetics brand Ulta Beauty, during which she spoke about her childhood, her coming out as transgender, and her transition.