An 85-year-old childless widower, a misfit
18-year-old girl and a never-married
83-year-old woman form a life-changing friendship.
In The Story of Arthur Truluv, Elizabeth Berg (The Dream Lover) focuses on
contrasting characters whose lives share common threads of loneliness and
isolation: Arthur Moses is an 85-year-old grieving the loss of his beloved
wife, Nola Corrine. A retired parks groundskeeper and an amateur gardener, he
rides a bus everyday to the cemetery and eats his brown bag lunch graveside
with Nola. There, he takes comfort in cleverly conjuring visions of the dead in
surrounding, underground graves--"Nola's neighbors"--and he imagines
the lives they might have lived. The simple gesture of a hand wave brings Maddy
Harris--an 18-year-old with a nose ring, who also finds graveyards
comforting--into Arthur's life.
Maddy calls the dead "her people," as her mother died in a car crash two weeks after Maddy was born. The tragedy and its aftermath drove a wedge between her and her father, who, tormented by his own grief, emotionally rejected his daughter and ultimately shaped her into a loner. When forlorn Maddy meets compassionate Arthur, their shared affinity for the dead sparks an unlikely friendship. She nicknames him "Truluv" because he speaks with glowing devotion for his late wife. Gradually added to the mix is Lucille, Arthur's meddlesome, 83-year-old, never married next-door neighbor, who faces a shattering loss of her own.
Berg's vivid characters may be vastly different in age, worldview and temperament, but they express a universal need for love, acceptance, purpose and connection. Tender, colorful strokes of humor dot the landscape of this touching story that deepens with poignancy and profound insights into the perils and glories of the contemporary human condition.
Maddy calls the dead "her people," as her mother died in a car crash two weeks after Maddy was born. The tragedy and its aftermath drove a wedge between her and her father, who, tormented by his own grief, emotionally rejected his daughter and ultimately shaped her into a loner. When forlorn Maddy meets compassionate Arthur, their shared affinity for the dead sparks an unlikely friendship. She nicknames him "Truluv" because he speaks with glowing devotion for his late wife. Gradually added to the mix is Lucille, Arthur's meddlesome, 83-year-old, never married next-door neighbor, who faces a shattering loss of her own.
Berg's vivid characters may be vastly different in age, worldview and temperament, but they express a universal need for love, acceptance, purpose and connection. Tender, colorful strokes of humor dot the landscape of this touching story that deepens with poignancy and profound insights into the perils and glories of the contemporary human condition.
The Story of Arthur Truluv by Elizabeth Berg
Penguin-Random House, $26.00 Hardcover, 9781400069903, 240 pages
Publication Date: November 21, 2017
To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE
NOTE:
This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To
read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (November 24, 2017), link HERE
