Courtesy Little, Brown & Co.
|
Web-Exclusive Book Review
Seven Loves
By Valerie Trueblood (Little, Brown & Co., June 2006)
Review by Wendy Smith, July 2006
|
You may want to throw down the book and phone your mother while reading the later chapters of this haunting portrait of a woman in older age. Writing her first novel at age 61, Valerie Trueblood poignantly evokes the quiet agony of a 74-year-old stroke survivor whose mental faculties are intact but whose body will no longer reliably do what she wants it to do. We are particularly stricken and disturbed by the delicate depiction of May Nilsson's difficulties with forming words or combing her hair because earlier chapters have shown her as strong and independent, someone who's had a good but not untroubled life and has coped gracefully with it all.
We first meet May, a widow, in a Seattle café, "a white-haired woman smiling at a little girl at the next table." She has retired from her job as an English teacher, but then she took a computer class and found herself an office job. Dressed in a chic olive-green dress with a jacket, May "goes at least twice a week to the movies [and] prides herself on knowing city talk." She's a model of a well-adjusted life, but Trueblood's sensitive, eloquent prose draws us into the turbulent memories beneath May's polished exterior, inviting us to marvel at the complexity of every individual existence.
AARP: Lifestyle Information for People 50 and Over
The entertaining and informative content on AARPmagazine.org is just one of the many benefits of AARP membership—only $12.50 a year. Join or renew online today!
Born in 1920, daughter of a fiery, politically radical mother who died young, May married a doctor, Cole, and had two girls. At 40, she fell in love with a black man and bore another child—Cole's son, it turned out, but the revelation of her affair forever altered their marriage. Beloved Nick, their midlife baby, died young after years of drug addiction.
Trueblood impressionistically conveys these pivotal events in May's life in chapters that take their titles from—but are not exclusively devoted to—each of her "seven loves." Her affection for Jackie, a young woman in her office, arises in the context of her pleasure in maintaining an active work life. Discussions with her daughters about her life-changing affair with Nathanael reveal her very different and slowly evolving interactions with calm, maternal Laura and restless Vera, two of the novel's many subtly delineated characters. The narrative unfolds like a blooming flower, with May's physical deterioration opening her mind to an excursion into the past for new visits with the people who have meant the most.
In the nursing home she moves into after her stroke, she makes a tragic mistake while trying to help a young attendant involved with drugs, just as she failed to help Nick. At this dire moment, when we realize how imprisoned May feels by her infirmities, her thoughts fly back to childhood in a way familiar to anyone who has nursed or conversed with an elderly person close to death. The magnificent final chapter shows us how May's first love, her mother, Anna, has shaped her lifelong odyssey right down to her final moments. In hardly more than 200 pages, Trueblood has managed to encompass the whole range of one woman's experiences with unsparing truthfulness softened by a profound optimism about the value and meaning of every life.
Wendy Smith reviews books for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and other publications.
Read more Web-exclusive book reviews
|
