Broke Heart Blues

One of our most incisive chroniclers of the human condition, Joyce Carol Oates has, with unerring skill, peeled back the fragile layers of ordinary life in contemporary America to illuminate the region she has carved out for her own: the secret geography of the heart, mind, and soul. In her newest novel, the acclaimed author of We Were the Mulvaneys and My Heart Laid Bare explores our never-ending hunger for heroes, the myths we create to assuage our loneliness, and the profound price we pay for our desires and dreams.

In the heat of a languid July, fresh from Las Vegas, John Reddy Heart drives into the quiet upstate town of Willowsville, New York. Eleven years old, piloting a traffic-stopping, salmon-colored Cadillac, he arrives with his stunning mother beside him, his grandfather and younger siblings in the backseat. His mysterious past has been left behind, but his legend is about to be born.

His mother is Dahlia Heart, a blackjack dealer of dubious reputation who always dresses in white. She has come to Willowsville to claim the rambling mansion left to her by one of her wealthy suitors. But it is John Reddy already growing into a heartbreaking hybrid of James Dean, Brando, and Elvis who will claim the town itself. It is John Reddy who will arouse the desire of Willowsville's teenage girls and the worship of its boys; the fear and envy of its men, and the yearning of its women. And it is John Reddy who will capture the town's soul forever on the night a prominent citizen is shot dead in Dahlia Heart's bedroom—and a statewide manhunt sweeps Willowsville's rebel outlaw into the realm of a living myth.

Over the course of thirty years, from the sixties through the nineties, Broke Heart Blues charts the rise and fall—and ultimate call to reckoning—of John Reddy Heart, through the myriad voices of those who find in him their whipping boy, savior, dream lover, and confessor. At once a scathing indictment of the cult-like nature of fame and celebrity in America, and a deeply moving meditation on human need and longing, it is a powerful and provocative achievement by one of modern fiction's most important storytellers.