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Overview
From James Meek, the award-winning author of the international bestseller The People's Act of Love, comes a rich and intricate novel about everything that matters to us now: children, celebrity, secrets and shame, the quest for youth, loyalty and betrayal, falls from grace, acts of terror, and the wonderful, terrible inescapability of family.
Ritchie Shepherd, an aging pop star and a producer of a reality show for teen talent, is starting to trip over his own lies. Maybe filming a documentary about his father, Captain Shepherd, a British soldier executed by Northern Irish guerrillas, will redeem him.
His sister, Bec, is getting closer and closer to a vaccine for malaria. When she's not in Tanzania harvesting field samples, she's peering through a microscope at her own blood to chart the risky treatment she's testing on herself. She's as addicted to honesty as Ritchie is to trickery.
Val Oatman is the editor of a powerful tabloid newspaper. The self-appointed conscience of the nation, scourge of hypocrites and cheats, he believes he will marry beautiful Bec.
Alex Comrie, a gene therapist (and formerly the drummer in Ritchie's band), is battling his mortally ill uncle, a brilliant and domineering scientist, over whether Alex might actually have discovered a cure for aging. Alex, too, believes he will marry Bec.
Colum O'Donabháin has just been released from prison, having served a twenty-five-year sentence for putting a gun to Captain Shepherd's head when he refused to give up an informer. He now writes poetry.
Their stories meet and tangle in this bighearted epic that is also shrewd, starkly funny, and utterly of the moment. The Heart Broke In is fiction with the reverberating resonance of truth.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374709327 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 10/02/2012 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 825 KB |
About the Author
James Meek is an award-winning writer whose novels include The People's Act of Love and We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. He lives in London.
James Meek is an award-winning writer whose novels include The People’s Act of Love and We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. He lives in London.
Read an Excerpt
1
The story doing the rounds at Ritchie Shepherd’s production company was accurate when it appeared inside the staff’s heads, when they hardly sensed it, let alone spoke it. It was like a faint stink, clear enough to notice, too trivial to mention. All through Teen Makeover’s autumn and spring seasons, when they clustered around Ritchie, asking him questions they already knew the answers to, cadging compliments and begging him to give their enemies a telling-off, they watched him. They saw he wasn’t as funny as before. Was he keeping his jokes for someone else? He moved in a weird way now, they thought. He walked with an awkward bounce, too eager, as if he reckoned something had given him extra energy, or made him younger.
As long as the rumor was unspoken, the hearts of the staff ached. The rumor was this: that after a long peace Ritchie was, once again, cheating on his wife, Karin, this time with an underage girl. They felt sorry for Ritchie’s family, but what if the damage went further, to the men and women on the company payroll? They sensed a personal threat. Scandal spread from the first carrier. Everybody liked Ritchie, but they were confident that he was selfish enough to infect them all. The production company offices were intoxicated by nervousness and suspicion. When twin fourteen-year-old girls showed up one day without an accompanying parent and asked for Ritchie, his PA, Paula, got up too suddenly from behind her desk, caught the trailing edge of a printed e-mail with her thigh, and upended a cup of coffee across her skirt. The chief lighting technician wrote off a fresnel worth two thousand pounds. He dropped it from the bridge when he saw Ritchie smile and touch the elbow of a lanky year ten in a short dress. “She had womanly curves earlier than most” is what the gaffer would have said in his defense, if he hadn’t been afraid to hex them all, and he only yelled “Butterfingers!” while the people down below were jumping clear of chips of lens skittering across the floor. When the script editor saw Ritchie talking to a group of pert-bottomed schoolgirls in leotards she strode over and interrupted him in mid-sentence. She realized, as soon as she did it, that she was making a fool of herself. The girls’ teachers were there. The ache of fear in her heart had made her do it.
The ache could be soothed only by being put into words. The production team needed an utterance to lift the dread from their chests, and when the rumor eventually found its spoken form, it relieved them so completely that they believed it. Much better that Ritchie’s ten-year marriage to Karin should break up and that he should lose custody of his son and daughter over the pretty but older-than-twenty-one new presenter Lina Riggs than that the boss should be doing something illegal and shameful, something that would stain them all with the indelible dye of an unspeakable word. Without anyone noticing the shift, “I wonder if” and “I bet” and “You don’t suppose” changed to “I heard” and “I’ve got a juicy one” and “I know who Ritchie’s shagging.” Believing soothed them all.
Ritchie found that whenever he went near Riggsy a stupid smile appeared on his employees’ faces. He didn’t know how happy he was making them by encouraging them to believe he was betraying his family with a legal adult. They didn’t know that their rumor had become wrong as soon as it was said out loud, and that the original rumor, the ache of fear in their hearts, was true. They didn’t know that Ritchie was seeing a not-quite-sixteen-year-old girl he’d met when she appeared on Teen Makeover the previous season. He saw Nicole once a week. It was his intention to enjoy it for as long as he felt like it, then end it tenderly. Nicole would, he imagined, be moved that he should voluntarily give her up. It would be soon, and nobody would have found out. How could they? The two of them were careful, and London was a wild forest of red brick and roof tiles, where maps only reminded you how little you knew.
Copyright © 2012 by James Meek
Reading Group Guide
James Meek's fiction calls to mind the inventive storytelling power of contemporary luminaries ranging from Jennifer Egan to Jonathan Franzen. With The Heart Broke In, Meek brings us an epic for our time, melding topics such as gene therapy, tabloid journalism, and the search for solace in an alienating world.
Within these intricately crafted chapters, brother and sister Ritchie and Bec Shepherd lead vastly different lives—he's as addicted to trickery as she is to honesty—while they come to terms with the death of their father at the hands of a Northern Irish terrorist years ago. An aging pop star and reality show producer, Ritchie begins to realize that his lies are catching up with him. Bec divides her time between Tanzania and her laboratory in England, where she dedicates her life to finding a vaccine against malaria. Ritchie and Bec's divergent paths are about to become united at the hands of Alex Comrie, a scientist who once served as the drummer in Ritchie's band, and Val Oatman, the editor of a powerful, sensational newspaper. As the self-appointed conscience of the nation, Val orchestrates a plot that will bring to bear everything that matters to us now: children, celebrity, secrets and shame, the quest for youth, loyalty and betrayal, and the wonderful, terrible inescapability of family.
The questions and discussion topics that follow are designed to enhance your reading of James Meek's The Heart Broke In. We hope they will enrich your experience of this shrewd and starkly funny novel.