It’s ‘ Truluv’ as widower and lonely teen connect
Arthur Moses is the antithesis of recent literature’s grumpy golden agers, such as those in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge and the popular A Man Called Ove.
The title character of Elizabeth Berg’s charming new novel, The Story of Arthur Truluv (Random House, 218 pp.,
gets the nickname “Truluv” from a motherless teenager named Maddy he meets in the graveyard where his beloved wife Nola lies. Every day, Arthur packs a lunch and heads to the cemetery to talk to Nola, who died six months earlier.
Maddy finds refuge among the headstones from the mean kids at school who shun her. Her mother died when she was 2 weeks old, and Maddy finds little solace in her well-meaning but emotionally distant father. Instead, she sneaks out of the house to meet her cad of a boyfriend, Anderson.
Arthur’s main companions are his indifferent cat, Gordon, who sometimes eats from his dinner plate (realistic, but blech), and Lucille, his lovelorn neighbor who occasionally cooks for him. These lonely souls come together when Maddy discovers she is pregnant. Kind, good-natured and caring, Truluv opens his home and his heart to the teenager.
Berg writes with a knowing hand about each character’s angst and anguish. As Arthur passes by other headstones on the way to Nola’s, the stories of the dead flicker into his brain, but his memories and regrets about his life with his wife are never far from his thoughts.
Overbearing Lucille never has wed but gets a late-in-life chance at love. Maddy, a gifted photographer, longs to create a secure future for herself and her baby.
These characters can be prickly — except for saintly Arthur — but they come to each other with kindness and generosity of spirit.
Truluv is a novel for these conten- tious times. We all could use a bit of Arthur’s ego-free understanding and forgiveness of fellow human beings.
When the inevitable happens in this heartwarming novel, good luck convincing yourself that the lump in your throat is just a sympathy response to one of Gordon’s hairballs.