Elegies for the Brokenhearted: A Novel

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All but orphaned as children, Mary and her sister, Malinda, stayed close. Hodgen, the daughter of poet John Hodgen, has an ear for rhyme and meter. The dialogue snaps— wicked as an adverb, summer as a verb—with lines that break oddly and lend rhythm. Everyone in this novel, it seems, is on the point of running away from somewhere or someone. Jenny Hendrix is a graduate student in cultural reporting and criticism at New York University and an editorial intern at Bookforum. Among the heartbroken are two of the most singular, memorable, and heartbreaking characters I have lately read: Mary's doomed roommate at college and her talented and self-destructive composer friend.

Thanks for this review of a terrific novel. I'm going back and reading Hodgen's previous fiction. Comments are open to registered bookforum. In Christie Hodgen's novel, there are five elegies written by Mary Murphy about five people who had an influence on her life. The prose is powerful and compelling, as more is revealed about Mary's own difficult life. This book will knock your proverbial socks off!

Sep 05, Daphne Atkeson rated it really liked it. This woman can write dysfunctional families like nobody's business. Vivid and vibrant and touching and profound. Original, tight, smart, funny, and achingly insightful. Sep 20, Lindsay Ferrier rated it it was amazing Shelves: I am so glad I happened across this gorgeous, heartbreaking, and yet ultimately hopeful novel.

Elegies for the Brokenhearted consists of five interwoven short stories, elegies that fit together like puzzle pieces ultimately forming the whole of protagonist Mary Murphy's life. Through the stories of five pivotal people in her history, all of whom died untimely deaths, we learn about Mary and her sister's troubled upbringing and about their mother, who dragged her daughters along thro What a book! Through the stories of five pivotal people in her history, all of whom died untimely deaths, we learn about Mary and her sister's troubled upbringing and about their mother, who dragged her daughters along through a string of boyfriends and failed marriages.

Most of us can't identify with Mary's situation, yet Hodgen manages to make Mary's story feel like our own, with thoughts and emotions about family and human connection that each of us can understand and relate to. For me, Elegies for the Brokenhearted was a perfect combination of thought-provoking ideas and a page turning storyline. I was riveted by the plot and literally couldn't put the book down -- At the same time, I was blown away by the spare beauty of Hodgen's writing, the deeper meaning in the book's characters and their experiences, and the explosive, heart-wrenching endings of her elegies.

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The book's ending, FYI, is jaw-dropping. The New York Times called this novel 'the literary equivalent of a hand grenade' and that's a perfect way to describe it. You'll find yourself drawn into the story and then beautifully stunned by its structure, its characters, its plot, and its truths. Elegies for the Brokenhearted is the kind of book that's ripe for discussion and dissection and would be ideal for a book club or a college-level course. Feb 28, Bonnie Brody rated it it was amazing. Elegies For the Brokenhearted by Christie Hodgen is a compilation of stories about Mary and the people in her life who were most important to her.

Each story is told through an elegy written after the person's death. In this way we learn about the people she loved and her own life as well. Uncle Mike comes knocking on Mary's mother's door one day and ends up staying for months. He's found himself in love for the first time and his heart has been broken. Uncle Mike is the uncle of every child's dream whether he was playing Santa Claus, taking Mary for a wild ride, or being a parent to her while her mother worked full-time and spent her evenings out on dates.

Mike was 37 when he died. You were dumb as a stick, a sock, a bag of rocks. Your lot in life, it seemed, was to go through it unawares, your folly a perpetual amusement to others. In our dead-end school you were the village idiot, and we stood around talking about you, your latest foibles, like the weather. To be poor as a child is to be poor forever. We also discover that Mary is attempting to escape her lot in life by attending college. Despite the fact that she has escaped her town, she states "How strange it was to realize that everyone I had known, everything I had seen and done, was still with me.

How closely, after all, we were bound together. Carson didn't have any interest in school even though she was there on a full scholarship. She flunked out after one semester. That was the last time Mary saw her but Carson left an indelible impression on Mary. She was as grand in her mind and intellect as she was in her girth. Carson was 21 years old at the time of her death. James Butler, 42 years old when he died, grew up in Arkansas and left as soon as he was able to attend Juilliard School of Music to study music composition.

Growing up, he felt different.

Elegies for the Brokenhearted:

He didn't like boy-type things. He liked reading and listening to music. Every day he wore a suit to school "and when the other boys passed you by on their way to and from the woods, they called out to you the worst name they knew - Fairy! They befriend one another to a certain degree though James is a man of solitude and haughtiness. You had just finished college and wanted to patch things up with your sister. Carson's death had touched you profoundly and priorities were becoming somewhat clearer.

James takes you under his wing to an extent and helps you find a room and a job. At one time he was a prodigy, but when he died all he left were twenty years of notebooks, filled with musical compositions that he had scratched out. Essentially you had withdrawn into your work, into solitude, and yet what was your work but an effort to communicate, to be understood?

She lived till the age of A narcissistic beauty, she felt entitled to money, fame, love and adoration.

What she found, instead, was a series of unfulfilled relationships with men and her own daughters. At 20, still a child at heart, she has her first daughter and is unable to bond with her.

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Shortly afterwards she has Mary and is unable to bond with her either. Most likely she was suffering from post-partem depression.

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You believe you have suffered like no one else, that you have been cheated, and you mean to have your revenge in whatever little ways you can find. However, you don't have any contact with your own children for years at a time. This is an amazing gem of a book, one that I treasure. Hodgen's writing is spectacular and it is in the little things that she finds the larger connections that make up the importance of life. Each of these elegies is an homage to the frailties and failings of the human spirit along with the desire to transcend through hopes and dreams.

Oct 24, Maryfrances rated it it was amazing. Christie Hodgen is a wonderful writers.

In this book, we follow the lives of five people in Mary Murphy's life, all eccentric and surreal. In her "elegies" to each of these five, the reader learns a lot about the life of Mary Murphy. Hodgen makes us laugh outloud as well as feel sad and moved by the many quirks and turns of this book. A very nice read.

Elegies for the Brokenhearted: A Novel

Nov 08, Lacygnette rated it it was ok. I liked the first two elegies: After that the portraits thinned and the narrator herself got less interesting. By the last elegy, I was skimming. Aug 17, Lukie rated it it was amazing Shelves: The five people Mary Murphy devotes her five elegies to are all troubled, struggling people on the edges of society, as Mary herself mostly is. The vivid, truly original and imaginative characterizations American, mostly blue collar, an assortment of gay, white and black , the unique format, and the superb writing give this great appeal for the literary fiction reader.

Sep 28, Rebecca rated it it was ok. Interesting premise - five elegies written for different people in the main character's life - but just too depressing. Almost nothing remotely positive happens in anyone's life in the whole book. Just drugs, abandonment, mental illness, etc. Oct 08, Mike Vogler rated it it was amazing.

Pretty close to top 10 all time for me, a stunning portrait of the losses a young girl endures. Mar 05, Leanne Dormer rated it really liked it. This may not be the best book you ever read, but it is different. It's well written, but a few of the "chapters" are a little too long. It did capture me more than any book I have read recently, though. Jan 19, Rachel rated it really liked it Shelves: I enjoyed Elegies for the Brokenhearted by Christie Hodgen. It is a rather bleak look at life of the main character, Mary, told through elegies to five influential people in her life.

She has a husband-bouncing, absentee mother, a drunk and high sister, and an alcoholic, show-up-once-in-a-blue-moon father. In addition, she is poor and also seems to struggle with depression. That being said, the story is nicely written. There are five main elegies in the novel. First, Mary discusses her uncle by marriage not blood who struggles with alcohol and drugs and holding a job.

Yet, he is the most beloved of her family relations. Next is Elwood LePoer, the high school dropout, who represents the town and its disintegration and poverty. Their stories represent her childhood and teenage years, and at this point she seems to be at the lowest point in her life. Carson is poor, fat, and black—adjectives that Carson often brings up in a pity me kind of way. She does deserve pity—her father beats her, she is poor, she is overweight, and she got pregnant in high school.

The next elegy is for James Butler, another oddball. Upon college graduation, Mary goes in search of her sister who she has not seen for five years. Butler is a failed piano prodigy, gay, and is haunted by his inner demons. Mary and he form a weird bond in their shared boarding house of a German woman still trapped in her childhood devastated by WWII.

Mary moves back home and starts to figure out her life. She finally seems to be coming to terms with her dysfunctional family. Hopefully the novel will show you how your actions can impact those around you and how you are not alone—the world is full of the brokenhearted. May 12, Zachary rated it really liked it.

By then I had seen wealth and had realized at last that we were poor. You, me, that whole miserable city, that godawful place, bleak and ugly as hell, we were all poor. We could hardly be otherwise. Our city was a landlocked settlement that had failed long ago, that had built up its factories - dozens of them, red brick, leaning smokestacks rising up from their rooftops - without taking into account its lack of "A week later I went off to college and for a long time I didn't think about you.

Our city was a landlocked settlement that had failed long ago, that had built up its factories - dozens of them, red brick, leaning smokestacks rising up from their rooftops - without taking into account its lack of waterways and the added cost of transportation this made necessary, all of its exports - wire, textiles - having to be carted out by horse, and so it was only a matter of time before these factories folded to their competitors, the city folding soon after.

And of our ancestors, the people who chose to stay behind after the factories were shut down, what could be said of them except that they were foolish, stubborn, hopelessly stupid, what could be said of them except that they were poor? By the time we came along, generations of decay later, the place was falling down, a third of its population jobless and walking the streets, drunks and drug addicts, crippled veterans, raving lunatics.

We were poor, our lives filled with the stupid things that poor people did, the brutalities we committed against each other, the violence, the petty victories we claimed over one another, crabs topping each other in a basket instead of trying to climb out of that basket; the desperate, impulsive lurches we made at love, no matter what the cost to those around us or how fleeting we knew that love would be; the indifference; all that we drank and smoked, the serums we shot into our veins; the hours we spent at grueling, mind-numbing jobs, one day after another, how, in order to survive these jobs, we scraped our minds clean like plates, cleared them of all thought; our prayers, if we prayed at all, sent off in rages, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus god-damned Christ.

I was shocked at how it felt like the author's nameless city matched all the bad stereotypical views of my hometown, Worcester, Massachusetts. A quick google later confirmed the author grew up in a suburb of Worcester. The interview with the author at the back of the book adds, "The decaying industrial city is a landscape that happens to hold my interest and evoke my sympathies. Very often I resist naming the city I'm writing about which is always, in slightly altered forms, Worcester, Massachusetts because so many of these cities feel the same.

Felt like a Catcher in the Rye, lots of wandering and wondering. I'm a sucker for clever endings and the 'a leaf tumbling to the ground' letter worked on me especially well. Feb 26, McGuffy Morris rated it really liked it. This novel is beautifully written, though often sad. It is pieces written to various people who have affected the life of the narrator.

As a whole, the book is thoughtful, well written, and very believable. Separately, each piece is sensitive, poignant and moving. Each piece, each elegy, is unique in itself, just as the person and the relationship was. Each character is genuine and the portrayal of the relationship is heartfelt and even heartrending at times. The thought and feeling involved in ea This novel is beautifully written, though often sad. The thought and feeling involved in each gives pause and reflection of those people over the course of one's own life.

Each of us can think of the many people who have entered our lives. Each person has affected us in some way, for some reason or purpose. This book addresses that idea. Christie Hodgen's novel will make the reader think about the people in your life that have brought you to where you are now, including the "broken ones".

Sometimes it is these broken people who have the deepest impact on us. For our narrator, Mary, these broken people included her uncle, friends, including family friends, and ultimately her own mother. It will make you consider the way you affect other people, because we all do affect each other in some way. Jun 30, Elise Hamilton rated it it was amazing Shelves: One of the blurbs on the cover says that it was, "The literary equivalent of a hand-grenade," and I'd have to agree. Very moving, but almost a body-blow. This is the first of Christie Hodgen's books I've read and it's made me a fan.

The narrator's own story is told through her elegi Beautiful book. The narrator's own story is told through her elegies for five people in her life. These characters are not only brokenhearted, they are broken, as is the narrator. It's one of those very sad but ultimately life-affirming stories.

I admired the book's construction, both from a technical viewpoint and in how it moves the story forward. I also loved how Hodgen used imagery in a poetical way, almost like the drumbeat in a piece of music. Here's a simple example, "Elword Lepoer, your head was a brick, a block, a lollipop. I'm curious to see if this is the way she writes or if it's a device she used specifically for this book.

Whichever, it was lovely. Nov 16, Jessica rated it liked it Shelves: If you think about your life and the people you have known, there are bound to be some that have since passed on. Their mark on your life is often more profound and memorable because they have passed, as is the nature of death. She is a girl trying to feel her way in this world despite the dysfunctional family to which she is born. The book takes us through her reserved, low-key life and her relationship with her If you think about your life and the people you have known, there are bound to be some that have since passed on.

The book takes us through her reserved, low-key life and her relationship with her mother and sister. But the interesting part is that each chapter is about one significant person in Mary's life who has died. Each of the deceased is memorable and important to Mary in his or her own way for better or worse and we learn about their role in her life's journey. I wouldn't call this one of my favorite books of the year but it was a good read and surprisingly not at all sad - despite all the dying. Nov 07, Jamie rated it it was amazing Recommended to Jamie by: There are no spoilers here.

From the moment you begin reading Elegies, you know that each person Mary talks about is dead. She says things like "You were Despite the fact that you know this, this book still works. Like Mary did, you get to know and love each of these people individually as their stories unfold. You don't love them instantly but you build up, through reading, a kind o There are no spoilers here.

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