On the one hand, Oates writes We Were the Mulvaneys as a conventional, linearly plotted novel carried forward by the force of the events that shape the lives of the Mulvaneys. She also makes Judd a first-person narrator, but because he is a journalist he serves as a public rather than a private voice. She allows him to slip into the role of an omniscient narrator who creates the interior voices of various members of his family. We move, for example, in and out of the minds of each member of the Mulvaney family: Marianne "[k]nowing she'd hurt her mother's feelings earlier . . . [t]hough she couldn't remember any longer what either of them had said"; Mike, Jr. deciding to do nothing about his suspicions that his classmates are raping someone; Patrick attacking Marianne's rapist with a plan "like an artwork he'd created, out of his guts, the...