Wonderland (novel)


Wonderland is a 1971 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the fourth in the so-called Wonderland Quartet. It was a finalist for the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and it has been called one of the author's best books.
Wonderland follows the character Jesse Vogel from his childhood in the Great Depression to his marriage and career in the late 1960s. Oates later wrote that Jesse is a protagonist who does not have an identity unless he is "deeply involved in meaningful experience", a theme that allowed her to address both what she calls "the phantasmagoria of personality" and the faceless nature of the novelist.
Oates wrote in a 1992 Afterword that Wonderland among her early novels was "the most bizarre and obsessive" and "the most painful to write". Oates continued to think about the novel after its completion, and rewrote the ending for the 1972 paperback edition. She also continued to write about the Vogels: the play Ontological Proof of My Existence is an expansion of Jesse's visit to Toronto in the novel, and she considers the story 'How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction, and Began My Life Over Again' "an analogue of Shelley 's experience as a runaway to Toledo."