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'Broke Heart Blues' by Joyce Carol Oates

Rebel spell

Sunday, August 01, 1999

By Kathleen George

	Broke Heart Blues By Joyce Carol Oates Dutton $24.95

In her 29th novel, Joyce Carol Oates examines our romantic obsession with celebrity. “Broke Heart Blues” is about a love affair between a community and its most attractive outsider -- the unknowable bandit, possibly bad-boy, handsome (of course) John Reddy Heart.

He made the national newspapers for a time; a popular ballad about him hit the charts; but long before all that, he was theirs. They loved him when his fame was only local, only as big as the small town of Willowsville; the signs of his greatness were in his dirty T-shirts, his animal smell, his basketball prowess, the old Cadillac he drove.

Since the people of Willowsville discovered him, found him in their own dreams, they will never let him go.

“John Reddy, eyes of icy blue. John Reddy, whoever knew you? John Reddy, John Reddy Heart” the ballad goes.

Heart? John Reddy Heart? With a name like that, good looks and a manner at once sullen and polite, he was symbol long before anyone could try to know him. His eyes, one of the narrators insists, were brown.

His fame began as soon as he drove into Willowsville, N.Y., with his beautiful mother asleep on the seat beside him, a grandfather and siblings in the back seat. “A kid wearing man-sized aviator sunglasses with almost black lenses. A man-sized hat (a straw fedora, for the record, with a dark band). His Indian-black hair longish, sideburns on his cheeks … Young, yet not young somehow.” He was 11, but a man already because of the worry, the responsibility he shouldered.

Stories about him -- who saw him, what he wore, what he said -- became legend. The boys wanted to be him, the girls wanted to know him; both loved him.

And so, in the voice of both boys and girls, adults looking back to their child-selves, the story is told. For most of the book, Oates uses a “we” narration. It’s disconcerting at times; you might think you’re still hearing from a boy, and it turns out a girl has taken up the story and vice versa.

The point is, it doesn’t matter. Everybody loved Heart, and when they think back on their lives, he’s at the center -- the way he drove into town, graced them with a comment here or there, was accused of murdering his mother’s lover, ran away, got hunted down, stood trial, went to prison. Handsome and quiet and unknowable all the while.

Almost as famous and mysterious as the son is his beautiful mother, Dahlia, a forever bride, always in white.

The chorus that tells the story is made up mostly of the people who grew up with John, and they are always thinking back, always returning to him as the subject that will inform their lives. Policemen, judges, parents, classmates are called on as witnesses.

In almost all of Oates’ breathless, manic, gossip-packed are quotes from the people of Willowsville on the subject of John and his family. “Like it’s her wedding day, every day.” “Something he’d said to someone, I forget who, made it sound like, yeah, he might be showing up at the prom.”

The girls’ part of the story is especially successful (Oatesian?) when one of them tells of a night they were all, gently and one at a time, led into a bedroom by John, who made love to them just as they wanted, perfectly, and then let them go so that they magically reclaimed their virginity later.

The book is dedicated to John Updike, with whom Oates shares literary abundance. There are reminders, too, of Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” in the story of the misunderstood high school hero, a story told rather than dramatized, the main drive being not plot but the teller’s voice.

Did I like the novel? I loved the idea of it. I wish it could have been told in a calmer, less prolix voice, but perhaps obsession is more often than not breathless.

I treasured my own time with John Reddy Heart, 80 pages sandwiched in the middle of the screeching fan-club narration of the first couple hundred pages and the dizzied drunken narration of the last 160 (the last section chronicles the 30th class reunion, a binge).

During those special 80 pages, I felt that I knew John Reddy Heart as others didn’t. Which, of course, is what Oates wanted. To include me, to make me fall in love, too.

When I finished “Broke Heart Blues,” I went to my high school yearbook and turned to an In Memoriam page for our quarterback, John Kamnikar, who died at 16. I tried to remember the details of his death. Did we ever know them? There was a car and a girl a year older than he. She died, too. Back then, we all invented the story of the last night of their lives.

In “Broke Heart Blues,” everybody gets married, so say the narrators, but no matter how grown up they get, first loves haunt them, and the thrilling feeling of early love can be conjured by a name: Verne, Katie, Dwayne, Jamie, Ken and always John Reddy Heart.

Kathleen George’s latest short story collection, “The Man in the Buick,” will be published next month. She teaches in the University of Pittsburgh theater department.