Cover art for the book The Angle of Falling Light by Beverly Gologorsky.

Beverly Golgorsky’s latest novel can be succinctly described by the series of words below.

The war. Poverty. Love. The war. Addiction. Dead end jobs. Pain. The war. Family dysfunction. Alcohol. The war.

Gologorsky is the best writer of working-class fiction writing today. Her novels describe lives of those for whom Washington, Wall Street and Madison Ave. tell us the United States is made of, by and for. Most of us swallow that myth with barely a hint of doubt. We love it when politicians tell us we live in the greatest country on earth; we even send our kids off to wars for reasons that change with every other battle. We watch as our lives become more difficult to pay for and skip medical appointments because we can’t afford to go to them. We grow old, expecting more loneliness, fewer meals and more mind-numbing crap on the television. The rich, whether they hail from Mar A Lago, Malibu, Minneapolis or any place else on the map, convince enough voters that the Trumps and the Kennedys, the Thiels and the Bezos of the world are the future. In our hearts we know this truth (if that’s what it is) means shit is probably not going to get better in any meaningful way. Some of us know that fighting back is really the only way things will be rectified and something approaching justice will be achieved, but even then that goal seems insurmountable.

So, we drift into a future fogged with drink, weed and pills; lust, affairs, broken marriages and broken hearts. Our children watch; they either mimic our behavior or reject it in part or completely. The familial love is often a love marked with guilt, perhaps even remorse. No matter what, it’s more complex than most can describe with words. Gologorsky is one of those who not only can, but also turns these lives into moments of beauty, sometimes forlorn, sometimes violent, occasionally tragic and always intrinsically human. She writes in the spirit of Greek tragedies, only in a setting defined by late stage capitalism.

Her newest novel, titled The Angle of Falling Light, continues the tradition I attempt to describe above. Narrated by the youngest daughter of a woman married to a man much older whose distance from his stepdaughters is greater than that from his wife, this newest work is not just a piece of working-class fiction. It is an antiwar novel. Every single protagonist in the novel is either a military veteran of some US imperial war or another. Or they are part of a family whose parent is a vet. Tessa, the youngest daughter, struggles with a series of situations in the family she knows. Her older sister fights drug addiction, her stepfather retreats further into his shell of depression, her uncle—a friendly enough guy—loses his struggle with PTSD never forgetting the horror he participated in, and her mom falls in love with another man. He, too, is a veteran of foreign wars with demons he is at least trying to purge. The geographical location for this story is a Long Island town stuck between its older roots and future gentrification. The economy is as harsh and unforgiving as it always to those without the means to keep up and the future is not so bright that one needs to wear glasses.

As Tessa goes out on her own and moves to the city, she encounters another broken-down veteran, a wealthy artist and her grandson, and an art teacher who not only sees Tessa’s worth, but helps Tessa begin to see it herself. The future Tessa considers at the end of the novel reminded me of the future taken by Liv Stamper in Ken Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Notion; after being both the object and the means for the men in her life to fight their ego battles, she leaves and heads out to parts unknown. A future unknown, but a future in which she can choose to make or not.

In a manner of speaking, Tessa’s future is a metaphor for the future of the nation which she considers leaving at the novel’s end. It is a future which must not allow war, greed or poverty to define it. Indeed, it’s a future in which all of these must be left behind. It’s also a future which must be fought for, given that those in power have made it clear the future they desire is one that depends on the phenomena listed above in their quest to take the world for their benefit alone.

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