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White trash blues >> Is Joyce Carol Oates making fun of herself?
by JULIET WATERS
We meet Evangeline in elementary school where she is already starting to exhibit "those strains of precocious morbidity and hyper scrupulosity that would distinguish her, years later." In her adulthood she will become E.S. Fesnacht, a respected novelist, and a National Book Award winner, described as "a voice of disturbing but penetrating insight into the tragic human condition." But as a teenager she is known as frog tits and is notorious for her obsessive "Death Chronicles," a black satin scrapbook of obituaries, lurid headlines of teens killed in overturned convertibles and women murdered by husbands, boyfriends, stalkers and total strangers. But, like all the girls at Willowsville High, the tragedy she is most obsessed with is that of John Reddy Heart, whose own headline reads: SUBURBAN TEEN TRIED IN SHOOTING DEATH OF MOTHER'S LOVER--16-YEAR-OLD TRIED AS AN ADULT, D.A. CALLS "VICIOUS MURDERER." Broke Heart Blues takes place at a "time in the Village of Willowsville, New York, population 5,640, eleven miles east of Buffalo, when every girl between the ages of 12 and 20 (and many unacknowledged others besides) was in love with John Reddy Heart." From the moment John Reddy drives into town in his mother's salmon-coloured Cadillac, at age 11, he becomes a figure of collective yearning. Rumours abound about his mother, Dahlia Heart, an ex blackjack dealer known as the White Dahlia because of her mysterious past and her exclusively white wardrobe. In high school, John Reddy becomes a basketball star whose aura of maturity beyond his years, combined with his genuine indifference to his classmates, make him a magnet for obsessive crushes. In his senior year, he is charged with killing his mother's lover, a much-disliked 1960s small town entrepreneur and baseball team co-owner. John Reddy becomes a nationwide symbol of disaffected youth, and the inspiration for "The Ballad of John Reddy Heart," a hit single by a band called Made in the USA (described as "early, unintentional grunge.") He is featured in Newsweek, Time and Life, and the eventual subject of a TV movie of the week. But the truth of John Reddy's life turns out to be even more sordid than anyone imagines. His worldliness is a result of sexual abuse by a needy, manipulative, narcissistic mother. And the obsessive "love" the teenage population has for him seems, from his perspective, just another layer of torture. Joyce Carol Oates has always had a taste for the sensational and the morbid. Girl gangs in Foxfire, serial killers in Zombie, Satanists in Man Crazy. So, she's not exactly anyone to preach to Americans about their fascination with all things lurid. E.S Fesnacht may be a gentle form of self-deprecation that frees her to critique the very phenomenon she's part of. Regardless, one senses in this novel she is starting to tire of the subjects Americans never seems to tire of: teenagers, violence and white trash excesses. For the most part, this strategy works. Although the first half of the novel abounds with tiresome '60s high-school clichés, it shifts gears at mid-point, when John Reddy tells his own story. But it's in the last third of the novel, when Evangeline returns for a 30th high-school reunion, that underlying critique in this novel starts to really show its teeth. More than anyone else, her behaviour at this reunion exhibits the atrophied adolescence at the core of the cultural malaise she dissects. In the end, the sad tale of John Reddy becomes an allegory for the excesses of the American cult of personality, of which everyone, including the author herself, seems to be a member.
Broke Heart Blues by Joyce Carol Oates, Dutton, hc, 369 pp, $34.99 |
There's a character in Broke Heart Blues who bears enough of a resemblance to Joyce Carol Oates that one might wonder if her 29th novel is intended as self-parody. Although Evangeline Fesnacht bears no physical resemblance to Oates, and she's ultimately a minor character, there are hints of a portrait of the artist as a young chronicler of white trash gothic.