John Reddy Heart came to Willowsville, New York, driving a salmon-colored Cadillac Bel Air and sitting on three Las Vegas phone books; he was eleven years old. From that day on, as John, his seductive mother, addled grandfather, and younger siblings settled into one of the town's most beautiful homes, John Reddy Heart would become legendary as a rebel, a heartthrob, and an outlaw. In this uproarious epic novel from one of our most gifted contemporary storytellers, the ballad of John Reddy Heart--his rise, fall, and second ascent into the realm of myth--is sung by a chorus of Willowsville voices who find in him their savior, scapegoat, dream lover, and confessor. Broke Heart Blues may be the most entertaining novel yet from Joyce Carol Oates: razor-sharp satire that holds a mirror up to America's obsession with celebrity.
"Superbly inventive, driven by a dynamo of nostalgic emotion . . . Broke Heart Blues more than maintains Oates's place as one of America's finest contemporary novelists." --San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
"Oates at her blazing best . . . The extraordinary and ordinary exchange fates, trade secrets, and locker combinations, for the fevered, hierarchical world of adolescence is Oates's great muse . . . Astonishing." --Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books