Brando. Dean. John Reddy Heart is right up there among them - at least in the eyes of the residents of Willowsville, New York. The handsome young heart-throb begins his bad-boy career at sixteen, the night that a man is murdered in his mother's house. Was John Reddy protecting her from rape or covering up her crime, or is he actually innocent? It may not matter - the minute the manhunt starts, the second the sensational trial begins, John Reddy Heart is front-page news, celebrated in song, and well on his way to becoming a small town's obsession.
The always inventive Oates has struck upon a truly innovative way to tell this uniquely American story.
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When the young John Reddy first arrives in town, he, as well as his beautiful and dissolute mother, becomes an object of instant awe. Handsome, dangerous and inscrutable, he transforms steadily into a virtual rumour, his every act loreworthy, his habits the stuff of endless speculation. "Though he enters you through the eyes, he's someone you feel," observes one classmate. While his allure is, initially, mostly physical--the boys want to emulate him, the girls want to lose their virginity to him--John Reddy eventually becomes transcendent: that someone like him exists is a challenge to the drab and predictable trajectories of his classmates' lives. When one of his mother's lovers is killed, and the evidence seemingly points to John Reddy himself, a feverish martyrdom ensues, a self-sacrifice that is, we discover, more tangled and exacting than his disciplelike peers can imagine.
Oates, admirably, takes many chances in Broke Heart Blues, not the least of which is a frequent use of the first-person plural(!) narrator. This device, while allowing both a broad and immediate view of the proceedings, often seems thickly undifferentiated, a means for emphasising the insular nature of rumour. John Reddy's identification with Christ (and the trinity he forms with his mother and grandfather) is a difficult manoeuvre as well, making him less a viable protagonist than a central cipher, an accretion of conjecture and myth. When, after a lengthy detour into the prosaic aftermath of John Reddy's high school career, we see his classmates at their 30-year reunion in Second Coming posture, longing for a John Reddy sighting, endurance of celebrity becomes not only plain but pathetic. The cult of personality may lead to redemption, but life, inevitably, is what transpires in the interval. --Ben Guterson
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. This book is in very good condition and will be shipped within 24 hours of ordering. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. See all our books here, order more than 1 book and get discounted shipping. Seller Inventory # 6545-9781860496936
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