A 16-year-OLD boy kills his mother's married lover, or does he? The crime at the centre of Joyce Carol Oates's hypnotic new novel quickly becomes irrelevant as the myth of the moody young killer takes over. John Reddy Heart is as handsome and attractive a son as his dangerously beautiful mother could be expected to have. But that does not conceal the fact that, for most of the residents of respectable Willowsville, New York, the West Texan family arriving to take up residence in a local and now dead rich man's house is little more than white trash. Any woman who looks as good as Dahlia Heart is bound to be no good. The local girls fall in love with John, the boys all want to be him, even his teachers sneak glances at him. But all this admiration is sadly one-sided. Not that the preoccupied John Reddy Heart, good at sport but quiet in class, is unpleasant. "It wasn't out of cruelty or meanness that John Reddy ignored us", recalls one of the characters, "not even out of distraction or forgetfulness or because he smoked dope with his buddies. . . but just because in some essential way, in his inner most world, the rest of us didn't exist". But for them he more than exists, he is existence and dominates their daydreams and fantasies. Whenever any of these girls are kissed, in their minds it is always by him.
In ways Broke Heart Blues is a wistful and relentlessly operatic ode to the 1960s and evokes a world symbolised by John Reddy's garish Cadillac Eldorado - the car which brings the family into town, soon becomes the boy's exclusive property and is painted a lurid green. Far more than an expression of his sexuality, the car defines sexuality for the watching high-school kids. Girls dream of being kissed in it: "He'd drive me home after school sometimes in his Caddie. We never exactly dated".
Oates is a writer of frenetic energy. Her output and range, however, have served to limit rather than enhance her reputation. A Princeton professor, the editor of The Oxford Book of the American Short Story and an astute critic, she has become confined by her talent, which is as emotive as it is cerebral. Fittingly she has dedicated this book to John Updike, another fine writer and - in common with Oates - one who has also suffered for writing so much. Her work has always been marked by an unsettling urgency which can be overpowering, even hysterical, but at her best - as in this dreamy, exact, earthy lament, or in previous works such as You Must Remember This or I Lock My Door Upon Myself - she can achieve extraordinary moments of clarity and in particular evoke emotional pain without yielding to sentimentality. Broke Heart Blues is extremely ambitious in that it appears to be sustained by a raw group emotion - the youngsters are curious about sex and are clearly obsessed with John Reddy Heart. But Oates is far more deliberate than this, and it takes considerable technical skill to achieve the texture of conflicting and contrasting emotions and urges at work here. She also succeeds in making the narrative a specific account of a hero who remains a mystery, and, in tandem with this heroic conceit, she is writing another story - that of a large group of characters united by being classmates and a lifelong interest in Reddy as an enigma and as a need: "Doctor, I realize this is an adolescent fantasy. I realize my marriages have been damaged by it. But if I outgrow John Reddy Heart, what will I have left?"
Oates has attempted to capture the contradictions and confusions of memory. Her novel is about the eternal present of the past, but, most powerfully, it is about a romanticised past which, for the generation of John Reddy's classmates, has never died.
It moves in three large sequences which, though obviously part of a whole, also act independently. The smallest detail - even a coke can, a passing remark - has significance. Oates appears confident of bringing her reader along with her and does. Characters and events are cross-referenced throughout, the repetition conferring a cohesion, and there is a sense of lives being lived. The narrative has the cross-talking and interruptions of life. Individual voices quickly emerge from lines of dialogue. The narrative unfolds partly as epic, partly as group session. It is social history and myth and romance. Above all, it is a narrative of voices, as told by swooning schoolgirls desperate for a glance and by a collection of rough-talking, knowing, slightly embarrassed boys: "As time passed it became unclear in our minds if we'd actually seen or only just imagined Dahlia Heart's sexy blackened eyes, bruised arms and (well, we couldn't have seen this) breasts, belly, thighs. It was unclear whether we were normal horny-crazed kids of sixteen and seventeen or sick perverts." All of their observations are filtered through by sexual curiosity and a sense of regret.
At times the voices acquire the quality of a chorus and in this the novel has echoes of Jeffrey Eugenides superb debut The Virgin Suicides (1992) in which a collective narrative voice revisits the events of some 20 years earlier. There are flashes of Alice Hoffman in Oates's deft characterisation and wry asides: "After high school in America, everything's posthumous." Oates has always possessed a virtuoso command of language - never better than here in the hilariously grotesque 30th class-reunion episode - but at times an earnestness suppresses its natural fluency. Here the evocative prose is gracefully hot and sweaty and gossipy, even cleverly chaotic, while the spoken speech is true to the youth of the speakers. In contrast to aimless high-school privilege is the dark claustrophobia in which John Reddy exists, a concerned son and doomed golden boy, senior to a nervy but brainy younger brother and a frightened kid sister. The Heart household is oppressed by the lovely Dahlia, who is anxious for social acceptance yet consistently defies the conventions to which she aspires. As the narrative progresses her character becomes more complex, her control more disturbing, her influence damaging.
In truth this is several novels co-existing in one. The witnesses, the co-narrators contribute their fears and regrets as well as their memories, their evidence. All share a reluctance about letting go of the past, in one way or the other, their lives have been suspended by John Reddy, their last link with youth.
Central to his importance is his status as a saviour. He saves his family but he also preserves the imaginative life of his peers. The years pass and when he next appears, he is a handy man, Mr. Fix-It. His early life has left him reluctant to become fully involved with anyone and he lives at a remove. When he eventually does meet a woman he loves, her domestic situation forces her to leave him. The least convincing sequence in the book it nonetheless does serve as a foil to the driving urgency of the rest of it and also reinforces the theme of John Reddy as a lonely Christ figure. For more than 500 pages the various characters wait for the return of John Reddy. The night of the 30th class-reunion is an orgy of regret ("Those aren't our classmates' mothers, those women are our classmates"), during which Reddy is expected to arrive. When he does, no-one hears him knock.
This could be Oates's finest work. It lingers and burns with life and longing.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist
