Martha Cooley, Buy Me Love
Or, running in place in turn-of-the-millennium Brooklyn.
Martha Cooley’s Buy Me Love explores the ways in which we humans get stuck and the partial and contingent means by which we free ourselves (if free ourselves we do).
Ellen Portinari is a free-lance editor with an empty billfold, a checking account barely worth the name, and retirement savings best described as dismal. In her fifties, she’s a poet with a solitary, long-ago chapbook and a singleton among her married friends. Crippled by the death of his lover in a terrorist bombing, brother Win is a composer who no longer notates, consuming vodka with kamikaze abandon and rendering his compositions in the form of uninterpretable squiggles. Father Walter, a famed baritone, mourns the accidental loss of his own, single musical composition, unable to take up anew his composer’s pen. Ellen’s unexpected love-interest, Roy Lince, squeezes his living from a collection of part-time teaching gigs, while Ennio, his adopted son, cannot move beyond the death of his birth father. Blair Talpa, a young, trans street artist, traverses her Brooklyn landscape largely unseen, crippled by the disappearance of her one, real human contact, her Asperger’s-afflicted brother.
If life with its devilish array of trick pitches often authors the terms of our entrapment, it is nonetheless true that we devise many of those terms ourselves. Our day-to-day may be unsatisfying, yet welcome, if ambiguously so. When Ellen wins an eye-popping sum in the New York Lottery, the solution to many of her problems...and Roy’s...and Win’s...would appear to be at hand, yet her chief concern is the caboodle’s-worth of changes that a mammoth influx of cash will inevitably produce. Free from worries about money, will she know who she is? Or will the windfall open space for other changes, smaller in magnitude if no less significant?
I am not immune to the pleasures of lyrical, even precious language (lookin’ your way, Cormac M.), yet it seems that the language I laud most in these pages is that which does the praise-worthy job of getting out of the way, conveying its tale in journeyman style, its beauty in its simple transparency. Such is Cooley’s accomplishment in Buy Me Love. If I were to levy a single, minor criticism, it would touch on dialogue attributed to eight-year-old Ennio. His precocity notwithstanding, much that he says rings too adult to my ear. Of particular value here is Cooley’s attention to the exigencies of dating and sex during menopause. This is a subject that merits attention from writers of fiction and, in Buy Me Love, Cooley portrays it in a way that’s both sensitive and pleasingly matter-of-fact.
Purchase this fine novel at your local bookshop (best) or at bookshop.org, an online retailer that donates part of its revenue to local booksellers (still pretty good). There’s a particular saintliness to these folks, our neighbors and friends, who bend their lives to make sure that ours are filled with the written word. Let’s keep them thriving!
