Six months ago, Joyce Carol Oates published her 63rd novel, “Butcher” (Knopf, $30). It’s a historical novel about an unhinged, 19th-century gynecologist who performs experimental surgeries at an asylum for “female lunatics.” The New York Times called it “one of her most surreal and gruesome works, sparing no repulsive detail or nefarious impulse.”
In addition to being incredibly prolific, the 86-year-old literary lioness is also wildly diverse in her writing styles and subjects. I expect she’ll be in a more sentimental state of mind when she delivers the Keynote Conversation at the Decatur Book Festival on Oct. 4.
The event comes just three days after the 25th anniversary release of her 1999 bestseller “Broke Heart Blues” (Akashic Books, $19.95), a book Oates describes as “a valentine to adolescence.”
The novel takes place in the ‘50s in a small village near Buffalo, New York, and it follows a tight-knit group of well-to-do teenagers as they obsess over an exotic newcomer to their school named John Reddy Heart. The girls admire his maturity and good looks; the boys respect his athletic ability. But he is an enigma, and a big part of his appeal is his unknowability.
The clique’s idolization of him only grows when he’s incarcerated after one of his mother’s boyfriends is shot and killed in their home. After high school, the novel leaps forward, painting a portrait of John Reddy’s struggles in middle age, and it ends with the clique’s 30th high school reunion where they reminisce and try to recapture their youthful joie de vivre to sometimes ludicrous results.
“There are a number of novels that I wrote at that time in my life that were so warmly engaging with young people,” Oates said, speaking from her home in Princeton, New Jersey. “‘We’re the Mulvaneys,’ too. I notice it’s on Amazon Prime Video now. I watched that last night. It’s all sort of part of the work I was doing at that time, which was about real, normal American families. … I’m writing in a different style now, so it’s kind of touching to look at it again.”
The action in “Broke Heart Blues” revolves around Willowsville High School. It’s a stand-in for Williamsville High, where Oates attended school. Many of the characters are based on people she knew.
“When I’m reading the novel, I’m seeing the streets and the school and remembering my girlfriends and remembering the high school ambience. And it’s very touching,” she said.
The book was inspired by a high school reunion Oates attended. There was something about seeing friends in middle age, remembering how they were in high school that she found poignant and wanted to capture.
“I went back to high school reunions several times and it was so astonishing how emotional we were,” she said. “The emotions are so strong. … I don’t think there’s any other feeling quite like that.”
Ultimately the novel is about the delusions of youth and the desire to mythologize the past.
“John Reddy Heart has his own life, and yet, seen from the outside, they all kind of romanticize him,” said Oates. “His own life is very different. He experiences himself very differently.”
In some ways, John Reddy is a precursor to Oates’ definitive examination of celebrity, “Blonde,” her 2020 fictionalized account of Marilyn Monroe’s short life. So, what is it about human nature that makes us inclined to bestow fame on a select few, I asked?
“I guess it’s a human predilection,” she said. She recounted a story about an athletic boy in her high school who left to attend Catholic school. “Even though he was gone from the school, he was always talked about very positively. It’s so strange when I look back at it.”
Many decades later she met his daughter and told him what a celebrity her father had been at school. The daughter said he’d become an alcoholic and led a troubled life, but that he always talked about Oates. She was the school’s celebrity to him. Oates chuckled at the memory.
“Everybody’s got these weird little memories and stories. … There’s just something about the human need to mythologize. And then when you meet the real person, you don’t really want to meet that person,” she said. “John Wayne, for instance, was such an idol, and everybody loved him as an actor, but then later when he was ravaged with cancer, people didn’t want to see him. It was like, ‘Oh, we only want you in your prime. We don’t really want you. Go away.’ It’s some of the same impulses.”
In typical Oates fashion, her next book is a complete departure from what she’s done before.
“It is very experimental. It’s my first whodunit where there is literally a murder, literally a detective and literally an investigation,” she said. “It’s not weird or surreal. It’s realistic. It’s set in a prep school in south Jersey. … It’s a kind of writing I haven’t done before. And at the end of the novel, you do know who the murderer is. It’s not literary where you wonder what happened and shake your head saying, ‘What’s this all about?’”
“Fox” comes out June 2025.
Joyce Carol Oates delivers the Decatur Book Festival’s Keynote Conversation at 7 p.m. Oct. 4 at First Baptist Church in Decatur. Admission is free but registration is encouraged. For details go to decaturbookfestival.com.
Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She may be reached at Suzanne.VanAtten@ajc.com.
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