The reissue of Broke Heart Blues, originally published in 1999, reintroduces readers to the breathtaking novel and includes a self-reflective afterword by its author, award-winning writer Joyce Carol Oates (Hazards of Time Travel). Oates's contemporary classic about small-town obsession and nostalgia in the wake of a true-crime scandal will appeal to today's readers perhaps even more than before.
John Reddy is only a teenager when he is tried for killing his mother's lover. Amid the trial's media circus, the local high school's swooning girls and overeager boys turn the quiet, enigmatic shooter into a heartthrob of epic proportions: the subject of speculative daydreams, the projection of personal desire, and the target of collective hero worship.
Broke Heart Blues uses its first portion to construct John Reddy as mythic vision through the collective first-person perspective of his admirers. In this prominent opening section, Oates's virtuosic control of pacing and voice constructs a tilt-a-whirl of mania, thrusting the narrative forward to the pulse of a small-town community's feverish heart. The novel's second section slows to a gentler, more grounded pace as it explores John's later life as Mr. Fix-It. While this section provides a new emotional core to the novel's tension, the final act whips the story back into a collective frenzy as Oates uses a high school reunion as a setting to probe the dark hysteria underlying seemingly innocent nostalgia. In her afterword, Oates doesn't spell out any answers to the "murder mystery" she claims the novel is. Nevertheless, she does pull back the curtain a bit for readers to take a voyeuristic peek into inspiration for the novel's dream-like world. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor