Broke Heart Blues
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 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.
- KILLER BOY
- MR. FIX-IT
- THIRTIETH REUNION
Plot
Reception
"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]