A young boy emerges from the dark shadow cast by his ne’er-do-well half-brother.
Growing up in Lynchburg, Ed Tarkington heard stories about the famous writer in his family tree, Booth Tarkington, who won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in both 1919 and 1922. “So when I said that I wanted to be a writer,” Tarkington explains with a chuckle in his voice, “my dad thought, ‘Well, Cousin Booth made a great living and was esteemed in his time.’ He did not realize that being a writer was not exactly a secure career path. So I was never properly discouraged.”
Tarkington spent seven years working on a novel set in the Southwest, a noir thriller in the vein of Cormac McCarthy. It was what he thought people wanted, what would give him a shot at the best-seller’s list. But after a long year of waiting, during which his agent shopped the manuscript around with no luck, Tarkington had a revelation: He was so busy trying to emulate other writers, he wasn’t writing about what really mystified and moved him—the complex web of family dynamics. So he set to work on a coming-of-age novel.
Only Love Can Break Your Heart is set in the 1980s and 1990s and tells the story of an average boy named Rocky who idolizes his rebellious, older half-brother Paul. Then one day Paul takes Rocky up into the mountains and abandons him, leaving him in a life-threatening situation. Paul eventually comes back, drives Rocky back home, and then runs away to disappear without a trace. As Rocky becomes a teenager and acts out his own milder forms of mischief, the love he feels for his brother intertwines with a low-grade animosity as the ideal of his half-brother tarnishes.
“I wanted to explore those conflicts of how do you get back to a place of love and acceptance when you discover that people are imperfect,” says Tarkington. “How do you forgive when you realize that the people you love can intentionally cause you a lot of pain?”
Tarkington lays bare this dysfunctional family in beautifully crafted prose. In one passage where Rocky is studying his father borne down by grief, he writes, “What I saw—what I sensed but could not yet comprehend—was the arc of a life that was not just the rise and fall of a small, forgettable man, but the story of the American century: its booms and busts, its catastrophes and regenerations, its fortunes built up from sweat and moxie only to be dashed by bad luck and bad choices, its false hopes and promises broken by the plain fact that we are all mere antic clay, bedeviled by the mystery that animates us.”
Paying heed to the old saying “write what you know,” Tarkington set his novel in Spencerville, a fictionalized version of Lynchburg. “I already knew the history of Lynchburg and all the many eccentric things that happened there during my childhood,” says Tarkington, who now teaches at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee. “I knew about the rock at Petites Gap where everybody went to on senior skip day to drink beer, things like that.” Local readers will recognize the various landmarks and landscapes, not just those of Lynchburg and Shenandoah National Park, where Paul temporarily abandons Rocky, but also the regal grounds of the University of Virginia, where Paul’s girlfriend, Leigh, briefly attends school and where Tarkington himself earned his master’s in English.
“To write about Paul,” he explains, “I thought about these boys I knew growing up on my street, boys who were sometimes cruel but very cool. They would tear down the street in their muscle cars and smoke cigarettes and beat up the little brothers and so forth. They fascinated and terrified me. And I just thought, well that’s a guy I’d like to get to know in my imagination and see what’s under the surface of all that fierceness and insouciance.” After months of forcing himself into Paul’s head, a role reversal occurred and Paul began to whisper in Tarkington’s brain: “I would be like, ‘Well, this is what I want to happen next in the plot.’ And then I’d think about it and say, ‘No Paul would never do that. This is not who he is.’ He and Rocky had become so real to me in my imagination, that their decisions were being made organically rather than by choices I was making.”
While plenty of incidental events play out and provide a deeper texture—Paul being shot in the leg while trespassing, Rocky’s tryst with a neighbor 10 years his senior, and, in the novel’s waning moments, even a murder—everything that happens revolves around the fraternal relationship as Rocky’s understanding of Paul evolves. Tarkington adroitly guides us through the family’s minor triumphs and major tragedies. And though we never fully understand Paul’s behavior, we never question their love for each other. The novel is a slow and thought-provoking stroll through domestic tragedy that will bolster your faith in the undying bond that unites all siblings, the lure and loyalty of blood to blood.
