SOURCE: "Journey to the End of Suburban Night," in Washington Post Book World, November 3, 1968, p. 5.

Below, Cassill calls Expensive People "a prophetic novel," alluding to several literary precedents.

The question is no longer whether Miss Oates is a very good writer—she is, indeed—but just how far and high she can thrust the trajectory of brilliant accomplishment she has begun. It appears to me that her gifts are at least equal to those of the late Flannery O'Connor. If she is not absolutely more serious than Nabokov—whose Lolita this present novel resembles in its virtuosity—she is more obviously "ours" and therefore to be taken more seriously by us. Everything she touches turns to such blistering gold that sometimes I suspect she must have had Rumpelstiltskin in to help her spin it in the night.

Expensive People contains and exploits a little of everything. It is...