Cheri's Reviews > The Story of Arthur Truluv

“We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars—everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”
Thorton Wilder, Our Town

It was six months ago, in November, the month when Arthur’s beloved wife Nola was buried, and he’s had a lunch date with her every day since. He heads to the cemetery on the bus, strolls his way through the headstones before he sits by her, sometimes he talks to her, sometimes he just listens. Either way, he’s in no hurry, she will be there.

This day, he stops in front of another headstone that seems to be calling out to him. A woman, born in 1897, died in 1929. He adds this in his head, she was thirty-two, but he does it again because he it would be disrespectful of him to stand there thinking about her, and getting such an important and intimate detail wrong. He pictures her in his mind, her hair, the colour, how she wore it, her life story pulling him in further. The colour of her eyes, her jewelry. Holding her little ones. And then the vision of it all fades. He heads over to sit with Nola.

He looks around at the signs of spring everywhere, a new beginning in the buds everywhere, the softening of the earth, and he wishes that his wife could return like that, again and again. A new beginning for her, surrounded by life, by renewal. Where she belongs.

He sees the girl sitting on the ground off in the distance, her back against a tree. He has seen her here before, he waves in her direction, she reacts as though she is frightened, and so he turns and goes to wait for the bus to return home. The girl, Maddy, feels badly, she hadn’t meant to scare him off.

Arthur is eighty-five years old. His doctor says he’ll live to be one hundred.

Maddy is seventeen years old, in high school where she feels like an outcast. She likes to take pictures and she writes poems, and she likes to read. Her mother died shortly after she was born, but sometimes Maddy feels as though she’s watching her, senses her presence in the eyes of a doe.

Lillian is Arthur’s next door neighbor, an older, lonely woman he talks to now and then, helps her out with her yard, puts the star on her Christmas tree. She loves to bake, and she is very good at it.

These three lonely people, whose lives have been tossed about, left with the invisible bruises of heartache, and yet life somehow manages to gather these three together, binding them collectively as one. A family, of sorts, each lending their strength, their talent, some compassion, an ear, love, and, most of all – love. We all have gifts to share, it just takes the one soul to share them and another to appreciate them.

Elizabeth Berg has written a simple story, simply told, about everyday people, who together, allow love in so they can, for the first time, or maybe even once again, become real.

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
--Margery Williams Bianco, “The Velveteen Rabbit”


Pub Date: 21 Nov 2017

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Random House Publishing Group / Random House