Valerie Trueblood’s Seven Loves

Next week, we’ll be talking about Valerie Trueblood’s novel-in-stories Seven Loves, my nominee for this quarter’s Read This! selection.

When I was in high school, I read Pride and Prejudice. I wanted to be Elizabeth Bennett (and thought I was well on my way) and marry Mr. Darcy. But when I read Emma, I blushed so fiercely my scalp tingled. I wanted to be Lizzie, but I was more like Emma: bossy, self-important, and headstrong. Austen had nailed me and I knew, to my discomfort, that she was great, a writer for me. I needed to attend to her: she did more than flatter me and feed my dreams; she taught me a truth about myself that I might not have seen otherwise.

Seven Loves had me blushing on the first page:

In the café, a white-haired woman is smiling at a little girl at the next table, who grins back playfully all during breakfast. The child’s mother, in a suit, silk blouse, and sneakers for the walk to work, has noticed the attention to her daughter. On the way out, she says to the older woman as they pass her table, “Should we keep her?”
The woman, May, sits very still, blank. “She is pretty cute, isn’t she?” prompts the mother in the same bright, practical voice, turning the child by the shoulders now with her fingertips.

I have been that mother, alas, “bright” and “practical,” proud to be in public and presentable with a presentable child, oblivious to the worries and preoccupations of others. Trueblood had nailed me and I was hooked.

In this opening scene, the other, May Nilsson, is the book’s center. The competent working mother disappears off-stage and we spend the rest of the chapter with May: ageing, worrying about her health, and surprised to find that she has a crush on someone at work, a blowsy divorcee.

The great and original conceit of the novel is signaled by its title: we gradually learn about May’s life through the stories of seven people whom she has loved. Some loves are central, some, while apparently peripheral, are surprisingly powerful. The prose is beautiful without being ornate. The emotions are strong and affecting. The structure, clever and complex, does not feel like a trick but like a fresh and powerful way to explore one woman’s life and loves.

If you’ve already read Seven Loves, what was the moment when the book grabbed you?

If you haven’t, do pick it up. Either way, we’ll be talking about it all next week and we look forward to your stopping back by to hear more.

Comments

[thb]

Lovey post; I look forward to discussing this book with you.

Wendi

[CAAF]

I loved this book, so glad you nominated it, Anne.

[ANait]

I adore this book. It has moved me in so many ways, in part because the loves it explores are so complex and so different from each other: the love for a husband different from that for a lover, different still from that for a child, or a parent, or for someone who inadvertently but indelibly works his way into your life.

Here's the line that hooked me: "May often thought of the missile gap rather bitterly, not for the reasons she might have expected of herself, political reasons, but because the words _missile gap_ were part of that spring, with the sheaths and wide cloth belts droves of them wore up onto the stage to receive their engraved circle pins, the music -- "Volare" in the piano lounge and in the elevator "Theme from _A Summer Place_" -- and her first sight of the man she fell in love with in the eighteenth year of her marriage."