Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Tarkington)

Only Love Can Break Your Heart 
Ed Tarkington, 2016
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616203825


Summary
Love can make people do terrible things.

Welcome to Spencerville, Virginia, 1977.

Eight-year-old Rocky worships his older brother, Paul. Sixteen and full of rebel cool, Paul spends his days cruising in his Chevy Nova blasting Neil Young, cigarette dangling from his lips, arm slung around his beautiful, troubled girlfriend. Paul is happy to have his younger brother as his sidekick.

Then one day, in an act of vengeance against their father, Paul picks up Rocky from school and nearly abandons him in the woods. Afterward, Paul disappears.

Seven years later, Rocky is a teenager himself. He hasn’t forgotten being abandoned by his boyhood hero, but he’s getting over it, with the help of the wealthy neighbors’ daughter, ten years his senior, who has taken him as her lover. Unbeknownst to both of them, their affair will set in motion a course of events that rains catastrophe on both their families.

After a mysterious double murder brings terror and suspicion to their small town, Rocky and his family must reckon with the past and find out how much forgiveness their hearts can holds. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Raised—central Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., Furman University; M.A., University of Virginia; Ph.D, Florida State
• Currently—lives in Nashville, Tennessee


Ed Tarkington received a BA from Furman University, an MA from the University of Virginia, and PhD from the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Florida State. A frequent contributor to Chapter16.org, his articles, essays, and stories have appeared in Nashville Scene, Memphis Commercial Appeal, Post Road, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. A native of Central Virginia, he lives in Nashville, Tennessee. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Set against the backbeat of classic rock hits of the 1970s, Ed Tarkington’s pitch-perfect first novel pays tribute to music, love and growing up in small-town America. That Tarkington throws in illicit sex, a perverted cult leader and a multiple murder only enhances the novel's hypnotic grip on its readers.... This novel may be a murder mystery wrapped in the cloak of Southern Gothic charm but, at its essence, it's a novel about love. Love for the music that informed Tarkington's formative years and love for the familial and romantic relationships that can hurt as much as uplift us.
Chicago Tribune


A coming-of-age story that evolves into a whodunit with tangled roots in three families whose lives collide in 1977.... [A] well-plotted, generous inquiry into the intricacies of the human heart—especially the broken variety.... Secrets abound, imaginations run wild.
Atlanta Journal Constitution


A clear winner—a taut, engrossing, crisply written tale of loss and abiding love.
Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News & Observer


A lush mystery-within-a-coming-of-age-tale-within-a-Southern-Gothic. If a book could have an Instagram filter, Tarkington’s would be set on something called "Nostalgic."... [I]nteresting, readable and beautifully written.
NPR Books


Tarkington’s writing is talky, devoid of flash, and calls to mind a young Pat Conroy.... [P]ropulsion is its primary attribute. Not mere plot propulsion—though there’s plenty of that, especially after the corpses turn up—but emotional propulsion: Tarkington’s fidelity to period and place is matched by his fidelity to human contradictions, to the gray area between heroism and villainy in which most of us reside. The gothic elements add spice, but the protein in this assured debut—the part that sticks to your ribs—is the beautiful but ever-threatened connection between Rocky and Paul. Only Love Can Break Your Heart is a novel about brotherhood, most of all, about the delicate fortress of that bond.
Garden & Gun


(Starred review.) This heartbreakingly effective coming-of-age story about the importance of love in one’s life is replete with moments of harsh cruelty and tender love. Beautifully written, it vividly brings to life its Southern characters, landscape, and small-town claustrophobia.
Library Journal


Tarkington’s impressive first novel achieves every author’s goal: Once you start reading, you can’t stop. And as an added bonus for Neil Young fans, Tarkington’s riveting tale provides plenty of classic rock riffs, too
Booklist


Tarkington carefully lays out his elaborate storyline and sensitively depicts his troubled characters, but it all seems rather pat, right down to the After-the-Main-Events summary.... Well-written and observed, though the characters and situations are familiar from many, many previous novels.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Only Love Can Break Your Heart...and then take off on your own:

1. Describe the relationships and family dynamics of the Askew household. Why does Rocky's mother distrust Paul, the smoking-drinking bad boy, while the Old Man remains devoted to him? Talk about the couple's marriage. Consider, also, the relationship between the two brothers.

2. How well has Tarkington shaped his characters? Are they convincing—do they seem to live and breath as real people? Finally, do you come to care about them, flaws and all?

3. What affect does Paul's desertion have on Rocky? Why isn't Rocky angry at his brother?

4. Why is Neil Young's song important to Rocky? What is the song's thematic significance to the novel? Consider the various forms of love at work in this story—as well as the ways that love both hurts and uplifts the characters.

5. Rocky is inducted into manhood by Patricia Culver. What do you think of Patricia? What are the consequences of the affair?

6. Contrast Rocky and Patricia's affair with the burgeoning love between Rocky and Cinnamon. In what way is that love "pure and good and true"?

7. Do the musical and pop culture references enrich the story for you? Are they helpful in setting the mood or in creating a sense of the 1970s and '80s? Or do you find them distracting?

8. Tarkington writes of the era of the 1970s as "the sweaty, nauseous, split-headed peak of the hangover between Watergate and "Morning in America." People, he writes, "believe that the country had, in fact, found sympathy for the devil." Are you old enough to remember those times? Does Tarkington's description ring true to you? Are there any parallels with the societal norms of today?

9. When Leigh insists she can't wait to get away from Spencerville, Rocky tells her, "You won't stay away forever." Why does he say that?

10. This book is described as a classic coming of age: an older, wiser narrator looks back at a younger self during a time of crisis. Surviving the crisis becomes a rite of passage, a threshold leading to maturity. In what way does Only Love Can Break Your Heart conform to that literary model? What does Rocky come to learn about the world and his place in it? How is the older Rocky, our narrator, different from his younger self?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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