Broke Heart Blues
{{Infobox book
| image = Broke Heart Blues.jpg
| caption = First edition
| name = Broke Heart Blues
| author = Joyce Carol Oates
| country = United States
| language = English
| publisher = E. P. Dutton
| genre =
| media_type = Print (hardback)
| pub_date = 1999
| pages = 369
| isbn = 978-0525944515
| oclc =
}}
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
{{No plot|section|date= April 2025}}Max, 1999: Plot summary
Reception
{{box quote|width=30em|bgcolor=cornsilk|fontsize=100%|salign=center|quote= “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.Oates, 2024: “Life itself is the ‘blues’—life itself breaks our hearts, which is the price we must pay for its beauty and terror.”}}
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.”Max, 1999
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":
{{blockquote | [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.Goldberg, 1999}}
Theme
The theme of the work is simple: “It's about how lonely, unhappy people mythologize their adolescence.”Max, 1999
Oates offered her own retrospective take of her novel’s thematic elements:
{{blockquote | 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.Oates, 2024}}
Footnotes
{{reflist}}
Sources
- Goldberg, Michelle. Broke Heart Blues. Salon magazine, July 28, 1999. https://www.salon.com/1999/07/28/oates/ Accessed 10 April, 2025.
- Max, Daniel T. 1999. Class Reunion. New York Times, August 8, 1999. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/08/reviews/990808.08maxlt.html Accessed April 7, 2025.
- Oates, Joyce Carol. 1999. Broke Heart Blues. E. P. Dutton, New York. {{ISBN | 978-0525944515}}
- Oates, Joyce Carol. 2024. “Intoxicating Nostalgia of High School.” Joyce Carol Oates on Writing Broke Heart Blues. Literary Hub.https://lithub.com/a-valentine-to-the-intoxicating-nostalgia-of-high-school-joyce-carol-oates-on-writing-broke-heart-blues/ Accessed 10 April 2025.
{{Joyce Carol Oates}}