Broke Heart Blues

Broke Heart Blues
First edition
AuthorJoyce Carol Oates
LanguageEnglish
PublisherE. P. Dutton
Publication date
1999
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (hardback)
Pages369
ISBN978-0525944515

Broke Heart Blues is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates published in 1999 by E. P. Dutton.

Contents

  • KILLER BOY
  • MR. FIX-IT
  • THIRTIETH REUNION

Plot

[1]

Reception

“In rereading, I feel a clutch of the heart, and tears starting in my eyes, on virtually every page: this is indeed a scrapbook of emotionally intense memories, of a time when I was not an adult, not a published writer, but a high school girl staring and listening as if my life depended upon it, not even knowing how I was memorizing this idyllic suburban world in which I did not belong except as a visitor from the north country.”—Joyce Carol Oates on her novel Broke Heart Blues in 2024.[2]

Literary critic Daniel T. Max at the New York Times regards Broke Heart Blues as one of Oates’s lighter novels, but which “displays great inventiveness and a justified belief in its relevance to our own emotional lives.”[3]

Writing in Salon.com, critic Michelle Goldberg laments that Oates has abandoned her “psychological acuity” for sentimentality and a “cloyingly nostalgic atmosphere.” As such, the novel resembles Gothic " The Big Chill":

[I]nstead of brimming with the acid poetry and cruel insights that usually enliven her fiction, this novel ends up as mired in banality as its cast of sad, stuck, middle-aged adolescents.[4]

Theme

The theme of the work is simple: “It's about how lonely, unhappy people mythologize their adolescence.”[5]

Oates offered her own retrospective take of her novel’s thematic elements:

Here is, I would suppose, an absolutely faithful portrait of upper-middle-class American suburban life in the 1950s: not a cruel satire, or any sort of satire at all, but rather a tenderly observed comedy of manners, a more realistic portrayal of American life of that era than its representation in the much-loved illustrations of Norman Rockwell.[6]

Footnotes

  1. ^ Max, 1999: Plot summary
  2. ^ Oates, 2024: “Life itself is the ‘blues’—life itself breaks our hearts, which is the price we must pay for its beauty and terror.”
  3. ^ Max, 1999
  4. ^ Goldberg, 1999
  5. ^ Max, 1999
  6. ^ Oates, 2024

Sources

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