Megan Hart: Broken, An Erotic Novel

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A lot of people love Broken. For me, it's a well-written, rather overdone book with a couple of major disappointments. However, if a book that makes you cry is automatically "great", this one's for you.

Five years ago, Sadie married Adam. Four years ago, Adam was paralyzed from the neck down. Two years ago, Sadie began a slow-moving but sensual affair of the mind. Once a month she meets Joe for lunch, and Joe tells her--in explicit detail--about his latest sexual conquest. Sadie returns to work and husband, and in private replays Joe's stories and touches herself.

Broken is entirely in Sadie's voice. Each month we hear one of Joe's stories--as told by Sadie. We don't just hear his stories second-hand, we hear them in Sadie's voice, projected into his lover's perspective. Meanwhile, we also get to know Sadie's quadriplegic husband and their up-and-down, complicated but loving relationship.

Things to like

Broken has some real strengths. The writing is strong and clear. It's meticulously plotted, and until near the end there's good continuity, considering all the personalities portrayed in Joe's stories.

Joe is a good foil for Adam. Both are articulate (one a poet, one a lawyer), but Adam has withdrawn from Sadie, while Joe tells her too much. Sadie sees too much of Adam--catheterizes him, worries about him like a mother with a sick child--while she sees and knows very little of Joe. That in itself must provide a respite from the overfamiliarity forced on her by Adam's illness:

That was the first time I heard what Joe does for a living, and his last name. I found these two details more intimate than the description of the car sex or the way it felt to have a stripper writhing on his lap.

Broken did choke me up, but I had trouble believing in large chunks of the story. The moments when I most believed were between Sadie and Adam. Their marriage provides the surprises in the book, the little contradictions that make Sadie more complex, more real. Her interactions with Joe hold no surprises. So she's turned on by his stories. So she replays them later. Wouldn’t anyone? And that brings me to the first thing that goes wrong.

Thing 1: Joe's not real

Points for trying something unusual in keeping all Joe's stories in Sadie's voice. It’s quite a feat, rather like doing simultaneous translation at the UN. However, it distances the reader from Joe. We're not in his head, which is fine: we don't need his point of view to get to know him by his words and actions. But we don't hear his words either: Joe tells Sadie his stories, but she tells them to us, in her own words, from her own imagination.

Thing 1.5: I shouldn’t have to agree with the author’s moral judgments to understand the characters

I can accept that Joe's role is primarily symbolic... but I'm pretty sure Hart intended some subtext about Joe that's not well supported in the text. I was baffled by several scenes, starting in Chapter 1:

He didn’t deny he was, indeed, the sort of man who picks up women in bars and sleeps with them, perfectly satisfied with one night....
I smiled. “That you’re a cheater? A rogue? That you don’t know the meaning of fidelity? That you go through women like wind through lace?”
“Don’t forget that I’m a silver-tongued devil who’ll say anything necessary to get into a woman’s pants. That my Holy Grail is pussy. That I’ve split more peaches than a porn star.... Go on and say it, Sadie. I’m a manwhore. You think I’m a slut.... I know you think it, so you might as well say it.”
"But, Joe," I said gently. "It’s true."
"It won’t always be true!" His words rang out, echoing.

I was taken aback to realize that Sadie judged Joe so harshly, and still more surprised that Joe agreed with her. I hadn't read anything indicating character flaws, and never thought Joe's single lifestyle made him a "cheater" (or any of the other epithets), so these judgments came from nowhere.

Later in the book, Joe asks if Sadie thinks he’s capable of fidelity. As I thought the real question was whether his latest amour was worth it, the exchange once again seemed a non sequitur:

Joe: "You don’t think I can do it, do you."
Sadie: "No.... I don’t think you can do this." And still later: "I can’t be your answer, Joe. I can’t be the one who saves you from yourself... to be your redemption."

These judgments baffled me every time. I felt I'd missed something until I read Janine's review at Dear Author:

For me, Joe started out with three strikes against him, since he (A) had slept with lots of women, (B) kissed and told, and (C) chose a married woman to tell his stories to

Aha! Apparently to understand this book I have to judge Joe in a specific way. I'd thought his whole character arc was a minor life transition, from Carefree Single to Guy Wanting Relationship. I missed the big redemption arc from Utter Manwhore to Good Guy. And why did I miss it? Because it wasn't there: all I saw of Joe was a fairly ordinary slice of his sex life. The attitudes he displayed in those passages were nothing compared to, say, Sex and the City. The leap to Manwhore isn't in the text.

That's sloppy. Joe’s lifestyle shouldn't substitute for character development. If you believe that being on the prowl makes you a Sinner In Need of Redemption, then the book has an extra layer to it. Regardless, it doesn’t make Joe any better developed.

Thing 2: the ending.

Sadie and Adam are better fleshed-out than Joe. They both have ups and downs, but they're consistent--until near the end. I'll hide the spoiler to discuss it (though I can't imagine anyone NOT guessing the whole thing by chapter 2).

Broken takes a turn for the trite at the end. I called this a spoiler, but did anyone not guess that Adam would die, and Sadie would hook up with Joe, be conflicted, resolve it, and finally hook up for keeps? The only part I didn't predict was his brief engagement to Priscilla. And as soon as Priscilla appeared in Chapter 11, I amended my prediction to include "Joe experiments on Priscilla, then dumps her".

The other flaw in the ending is Sadie's abrupt loss of consistency. Broken spends most of its time wallowing in the erotic (many chapters of Joe's stories) and the tear-jerking (many chapters about Adam's illness). Where is Sadie herself, in all this? I was missing that character who drives the story forward. I enjoyed the gradual fleshing-out for a few chapters... but came to feel I'd have enjoyed the book as a whole more if I'd skipped a few of Joe's stories. They're good, hot stories, but there's a lot of words for very little movement in plot or character. After Adam dies, the life goes out of the story. Without him to react to, Sadie's character goes flabby. And seriously, what happened to her anger? She's (understandably) seethed with it through the entire book; then Adam dies, and she spares hardly a thought for the man who caused it? She’s furious with him before Adam’s stroke, but afterward there’s no railing against fate; only, briefly, against Adam. It’s hard to believe all that rage is suddenly gone. The ending is strangely tidy, in both plot and emotion. Ah well, perhaps she'll turn into a domestic tyrant and kick Joe around to make up for lost time.

Grade: I'd say a B for being tightly crafted, but overall it's a C- for unreflected judgments, wallowing, and the ending.

Tags: books, reviews, romance, chick lit, tearjerker, erotic