John Reddy, John Reddy Heart.
John Reddy, you had our hearts.
John Reddy, we would’ve died for you.
John Reddy, John Reddy Heart.
With these lines opens the 500 page saga, Broke Heart Blues by Joyce Carol Oates. The novel revolves around the central figure of John Reddy Heart, a teenager at the Willowsville Senior High School, Willowsville, New York. Amongst a class of mostly rich kids who live in affluent mansions, John Reddy Heart is unique. Lugging all the family belongings in a U-Haul trailer; grandpa, kid brother, sister in the back seat, Dahlia Heart – his mother – at his side, John reddy heart arrived in Willowsville four years ago, in a bright-salmon-colored Caddie that was pulling the trailer, driving it all the way from Vegas, sitting on three telephone directories because he was not tall enough to see the street at the tender age of eleven. By the time he is sixteen, working part time in a carpentry shop, he has matured beyond his age. Reticent, hardly acknowledging the greetings of his classmates, John Reddy Heart is already an enigmatic attraction for all the girls between ages of twelve and twenty (often their mothers included). The guys, sometimes wary of this inexplicable popularity, are not jealous. They want to invite him to their parties, bond with him. John Reddy Heart always politely declines such invitations. Sometimes, you see red marks on his face, he has been in a fight.
In the first part of the novel, we observe John Reddy Heart though the eyes of his classmates. Who in particular is the observer is never made clear. A general “we” suffices as if it’s a collective consciousness of the class. They follow him everywhere, going out of classrooms, in the gym, during the basketball games, even drive by his apartment at night to see if he is in. This obsessions takes on a fever pitch when John Reddy Heart is arrested for killing Melvin Riggs, a controversial personality involved in local politics, member of the local county board and lover of Dahlia Heart. A long period of suspense punctuated by frantic media attention, rumours and a mistrial, results in acquittal of John Reddy Heart, though he spends the next two years in prison pleading guilty to other charges.
Throughout this first part, we are not allowed even a glimpse of what is going through John Reddy Heart’s mind. That is reserved for the second part. By bits and pieces, we get to know this enigmatic figure, flashes of memory fit like parts of puzzle, piecing together the sordid, painful past. His classmates, whose sole obsessions was and still is John Reddy Heart, almost never appear in his thoughts, confirming what one of them, Dwayne Hewson, summed up thus, “..in some essential way, in his innermost world, the rest of us didn’t exist.”
Third part is a wild trip down the nostalgic lane, the thirtieth reunion of the class.
“A time of joy, if a time of sorrow; a time of bittersweet laughter, and a time of tears. Our thirtieth reunion.”
Some of them will never make it, having found their permanent places in graveyards and obituaries. Once young, fresh faces have long lost their youthful luster, muscles have given way to overweight bellies and oversized hips, wallets are stronger, body is weaker – sometimes battling with viruses and diseases. Even Willowsville has changed, all the old landmarks only exist in the memories. The once young, now middle aged friends come together to laugh, cry, reminisce, wondering how and where the time went. As Ritchie Eickhorn, now a well known poet but still the same old Ritchie to his friends, chanted
“O youth O America like gold coins falling from our pockets!
so many coins! such riches! no need to stoop to pick up what you have dropped.”
I must confess that my experience of reading this novel can be compared to a westerner visiting Taj Mahal. You know you are experiencing something magical, but you do not have enough cultural background to really appreciate it. I know nothing about the particular American sub-culture described in Broke Heart Blues, but I don’t need to. The universal character of human emotions transcends this cultural gap. You connect to the characters on a level that is beyond any of the artificial barriers. Reading Broke heart Blues, I felt an emotion that does not have a word. I felt nostalgic about a past that I had not experienced personally.
Writers have different styles, like different brush strokes, but the picture they paint touches you in ways that are hard to describe. Broke Heart Blues leaves you with a bitter sweet emotion, something that Haruki Murakami describes as, “a childhood longing, that had always remained – and would ever remain – unfulfilled.” This is what the title means. Broke heart Blues do not refer to a routine romantic breakup, they represent a collective sigh of all of us who long for the days gone by that always appear magical in the golden light of nostalgia.
Some writers are prolific, some write infrequently but produce high quality stuff. Joyce Carol Oates is known for consistently producing masterpieces at a breathtaking pace. While interviewing Joyce Carol Oates, an interviewer once remarked, “You’re frequently charged with producing too much.” To which I may add, “And we are so grateful.”
