BROKE HEART BLUES

            The story of a handsome teenaged killer whose romantic notoriety reverberates for decades in the minds and hearts of his classmates and neighbors is the highly charged core of Oates’s generously detailed twenty-ninth novel.

            In the late 1960s in the upstate New York town of Willowsville (a Buffalo suburb), 16-year-old John Reddy Heart – a charismatic, Brando-like loner – shoots and kills his mother Dahlia’s lover, a prominent local businessman; goes on trial for murder; and serves a brief prison term.  Separate choruses of voices – those of the girls who adored him, and those of the boys who were his casual friends, teammates, and envious admirers – tell a patchwork tale of a self-possessed boy who came out of the West with his odd fragmented family, lived stoically and all but silently among the people he fascinated until the violent day that made him a local legend forever, and, after graduation day, disappeared without a trace.  Then, halfway through the novel, Oates shifts to John Reddy’s own viewpoint, telling the story of his life both before and after Willowsville, though without ever compromising the curious opacity of his character.  Finally, the “voices” of Willowsville speak again, on the occasion of his high school class’s thirtieth reunion; a celebration whose saturnalian excess is fuelled by others’ heated memories of him, as well as the (quickly accepted) rumor that he attended that reunion secretly, then stole away again without speaking to anyone.  Was John Reddy his mother’s heroic defender or (as the details of his past suggest) only a disadvantaged kid caught in a spiral of accident that predetermined his fate?  Is he, in fact, a distressingly ordinary soul onto whom others project their deepest dreams and fantasies?

            That ambiguity is dramatized in a mesmerizing portrayal of small-town America in extremis that speaks volumes about the way our imaginations create our own reality.