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Oct 23, 2024 By Frank Valish

Joyce Carol Oates’ Broke Heart Blues is a massive, decades-spanning novel that tackles big themes of youth, aging, desire, and memory through the story of a group of high school students in the fictional upstate New York town of Willowsville, as well as their reconvening upon their graduating class’ 30-year reunion. The book, originally published just before the turn of the century, is celebrated here in Akashic Books’ own 25th Anniversary Edition, with a reflective afterward by Oates herself.

Broke Heart Blues initially seems to be at its core the story of John Reddy Heart, a pre-teen child of a dysfunctional family who rides into town from Las Vegas with the inheritance of a house for he and his family to claim. Heart’s mother, the glamorous widower Dahlia Heart fashions herself something of a high-minded woman about town, and Broke Heart Blues’s first part centers around John Reddy Heart’s capture in the shooting death of one of his mother’s lovers.

However, this teenage murderer conceit works for most of the book as simply the backdrop to larger the story of the Willowsville high schoolers who, upon the mysterious presence of the Hearts and the dreamy John Reddy into town find themselves either yearning to be the mercurial John Reddy or yearning to be with with him. Their perceptions, assumptions, aspirations, dreams, and desires are pinned on the aloof young man, and the first few hundred pages of Broke Heart Blues follows their high school stories.

The next nearly hundred pages dives into the life of John Reddy Heart after his capture for the murder of his mother’s lover, but it also provides background into the mysterious John Reddy’s past, the family history that brought them to Willowsville, and how he fashioned his adulthood years after high school. The book’s final almost hundred pages centers on the Willowsville high schoolers’ thirty year class reunion, the cast of characters reliving their earlier years and once again pinning hopes on John Reddy Heart, this time in the form of a possible sighting at the reunion.

In her tome, Oates paints a vivid picture of Willowsville. The cast of characters is immense, the detail almost pain-staking in its portraiture. She deftly paints a picture of the feigning idiocy of high school, with its crushes, obsessions, misjudgments, assumptions, and crises of their own making. The real John Reddy Heart comes out in the novel’s second part, but the real John Reddy Heart was never present to the cast of Willowsville youth, nor ultimately their middle aged selves thirty years on. Ultimately, as such, Broke Heart Blues illuminates the dichotomy of reality versus perception, truth versus belief, with a healthy dose of the effect distortions of memory play on one’s own self-histories and manufactured pasts. (www.akashicbooks.com)

Author rating: 8/10