Tom Wolfe in his essay “My Three Stooges,” accused the three most prominent novelist of late twentieth-century-America, Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving, of missing the true soul of America. Of missing the life and death of small towns and cities. Of failing to portray the American soul, and aspirations of the people. Of not caring about or having the slightest interest in their births, their lives, their deaths.
He accused an entire generation of writers of missing the greatest story before them, right in front of their faces and missing the greatest show on earth.
Now Tom Wolfe’s hopes are fulfilled. Now America has the novelist she has been waiting for. Generation X has the novelist it has needed.
Now we have Loretta Buckley Malakie.
Love in the Age of Dispossession follows the life of Kitty Burnes through high school, to college, law school, the working world and into a new generation.
The characters are not simply TV-show teens or young people. They are of a time and place. And the time and place is up-state New York in the 1990s. Kitty is not a rootless suburban nonentity. She is someone with a background.
The book starts off with a social history of her town, which as a story-telling techniques, surprised and delighted me at the same time. This is not an academic novel. This is not a ticket-punching novel written by an academic climber, this is real story telling about real people. The people have their flaws, they make good decisions and bad decisions, as real people do.
And unlike academic novels, I want to mention that Loretta Malakie also acknowledges, and portrays well, the importance of the religious upbringing of her characters. Kitty’s background is Irish Catholic. This is not simply something tossed in. It is an important influence on her development and her view of life. She I not, in that detestable phrase, a recovering Catholic. She is a believing, but like many of us, not consistently, practicing Catholic.
We start of observing Kitty with her second boy friend, Mike. She had recently dropped her first, Peter, for him. In the story, along comes Holcombe, part of her set. And her true love?
This sounds like some chick-lit teen romance, but it isn’t. It is a an exposition of how we really live and interact with one anther. Is it the best way? Probably not, but it is how we are.
And this is what I love so much about this book. We go from the small town in upstate, to New York City, and not only see the consequences, but live them with the characters.
Unfortunately, I never take notes when I read a novel, and it’s hard to thumb through a Kindle e-book, so finding passages to quote is difficult for me, but I do remember one line that was telling and quite well observed. When talking about New York City hipsters living in squalid, small rundown apartments, Kitty says they thought they were hip, but they were just poor.
Loretta the Prole, as she styles herself on Twitter, says that this book is chick-lit. But if it’s chick-lit, it’s chick-lit in the same way that Raymond Chandler’s novels are mysteries. It is transcendent chick-lit.
It is for us all.
I’ll take chick-lit over boring academic navel gazing and ticket punching tomes of utter boredom and literary death.
This novel is generally a story of decline and, as the title says, dispossession, but it ends on a note of spiritual and temporal hope.
The last line is:
The baby’s eyes were blue.
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Reviews with images
A lovely, well-written novel
Love in the Age of Dispossession is an excellent novel filled with charismatic characters and an engaging story line. The protagonist, Kitty, is interesting and engaging and I found myself riveted on to what was going to happen to her next! A great book.
