Broke Heart Blues
Broke Heart Blues is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates published in 1999 by E. P. Dutton.
Contents
Reception
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."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:
Theme
The theme of the work is simple: "It's about how lonely, unhappy people mythologize their adolescence."Oates offered her own retrospective take of her novel's thematic elements: