 First edition | |
| Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | E. P. Dutton |
Publication date | 1999 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 369 |
| ISBN | 978-0525944515 |
Broke Heart Blues is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates published in 1999 by E. P. Dutton .
 | This section needs a plot summary.(April 2025) |
“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. [2]
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.” [3]
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":
[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. [4]
The theme of the work is simple: “It's about how lonely, unhappy people mythologize their adolescence.” [5]
Oates offered her own retrospective take of her novel’s thematic elements:
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. [6]