‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ a ’70s-era coming-of-age tale

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

$25.95, 320 pages

Our hearts were broken over and over throughout the ’70s and ’80s — by the Vietnam War, Kent State, Watergate, the shooting of John Lennon, Reagonomics and the Black Monday crash of 1987. These decades of unrest and sweeping social change form the shifting backdrop of Ed Tarkington’s unhurried, richly textured portrait of small-town dysfunction and murder, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.”

A coming-of-age story that evolves into a whodunit with tangled roots in three families whose lives collide in 1977, the novel opens when narrator Rocky Askew is 7 and his half-brother Paul is 16. They share a father they call the Old Man, and his much younger wife, Rocky’s mother, who resents her stepson’s hold over her husband and finds him as impossible to love as he is irresistible to Rocky.

Recalling his mother’s favorite assessment of Paul, Rocky admits, “For the longest time, I thought ‘born manipulator’ was a single word.” Fueling Paul’s anger is a tragedy that took place when he was 5: the death of his sister, his mother’s subsequent breakdown and her desertion of Paul and his father.

Both boys grow up during a period when people watched “the far-flung corners of the world burst into flames on their brand-new, first-ever color TVs,” and came to believe that “the country had, in fact, found sympathy for the devil.” So it seems when the wealthy Culvers move into a vacant home next door to the Askews, setting in motion a chain of events culminating in a grisly crime that changes the sleepy town forever.

Genteel, conservative Spencerville is the perfect foil for the “effortlessly cool” rebel-without-a-cause Paul, who tears around town with his rowdy friends, smokes and throws beer parties, and defiantly dates Leigh Bowman, the “good” daughter of a local judge. Following a regrettable act of vengeance against his father, Paul goes missing when Rocky is 9, taking Leigh with him. Though she returns within the year, he does not, and in his absence, Rocky grows up and finds solace in the arms of Patricia Culver, the X-rated, much older girl-next-door. The Old Man, 59 in the opening pages, never fully recovers from his son’s disappearance, and Paul comes home just in time to take over his father’s care and play his part in the tangled double-murder that dominates the last third of the book.

Rocky recreates this complicated history from the vantage point of 25 years later, recollecting the naïve and eager boy he was then and the various random circumstances that nevertheless led to irrevocable choices. Though he’s unable to comprehend much of what he sees at the time, the narrative deftly toggles between his youthful confusion and the understanding and forgiveness that come later. Here, he reflects on his father’s devastating financial loss in ’87:

“If I’d been less absorbed in my own affairs, I might have noticed the horror and disbelief on the Old Man’s face … But it meant very little to me at the time. Nothing was the end of the world, until it was …. I left the room oblivious to his anguish and went upstairs, where I put on Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ and fell on the bed to daydream.”

The novel’s leisurely pace, moving forward by days and weeks, and periodically telescoping years into a few sentences, keeps track of the fallout occasioned by Paul’s flight — his girlfriend’s muddied emotional life, the Old Man’s declining health and its effect on his family’s finances, and Rocky’s loss of a role model, however manipulative.

Music — beginning with Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd — marks the passage of time and forms the touchstones of Rocky and Paul's relationship, even after Paul is gone. Tarkington took the book's title from a song on Young's third album, "After the Gold Rush," the same classic rock Rocky will record on an '80s mix tape, saying, "Thus did I appoint myself the caretaker of Paul's memory." Well-worn rock lyrics prompt some of the questions young Rocky asks himself about life: "The Old Man had been right, I thought … Old age is a damned disgrace. Wasn't that what Neil Young meant when he said, It's better to burn out? Wasn't that what Townshend meant when he said, I hope I die before I get old?"

Tarkington, who grew up in Lynchburg, Va., populates “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” with a diverse and credible cast plucked straight from a privileged Southern childhood, such as the horsey, enigmatic Patricia, with her own reasons for seducing 15-year-old Rocky; William, the inscrutable African-American caregiver to the Old Man who knows him better than his own children; and Rex LaPage, the high school drama director and former New Yorker who foregoes the usual “Bye Bye Birdie” for the far edgier “Equus.” Though all the players ring true, it’s Rocky whose voice is the most engaged and whose nuanced observations amount to a detective-style investigation into the motives and psyches of the others.

In this well-plotted, generous inquiry into the intricacies of the human heart — especially the broken variety — there’s always more than one version of the “truth.” Secrets abound, imaginations run wild, and more than once, we’re led to wonder if Rocky can ever really know anyone he loves at all, much less their emotional core. No matter. In the end, he concludes that to love is to risk heartbreak, and the story he tells repeats the same message his musical hero shared in 1970: Even if our world should fall apart, it’s worth it.