Prick of the Spindle: Reviews: Brinson: Amalie in Orbit by Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer

ISBN-10: 0-9797516-3-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-9797516-3-9
The Wessex Collective, December 2008

Amalie in Orbit is a strange but appropriate title for Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer’s novel. Amalie Price seems relatively level-headed and goal-oriented even under strange and difficult circumstances, but she sees herself, recent widow of a New York city professor, as defined by her widowhood and her prior marriage. She broods over self-diagnosed spinelessness, wallowing at intervals in internal monologues where she compares the life sshe used to have, as a dependent housewife with an ill-defined self, against the life she struggles to build for herself—a life of action and power intended to influence others. It is as though Amalie thinks that the presence or absence of her husband is an entity so heavy that its gravity defines her course. But the Amalie that endears herself to the reader is a woman who, level-headedly and with a great deal of humor, navigates a tumult of events and personalities: 1980’s workplace chauvinism, her son’s extreme teenage bohemianism, her own small carousel of unsuitable romantic partners, and the political upheaval of a city reinventing itself—starting with the gentrification of her apartment building.

Amalie’s intellectual. She’s effective. And the novel that chronicles her life in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death is quirky, funny, full of personalities at once well-defined and interesting. The dialogue reads like a modern day Jane Austen novel, quick and well-informed. Kirchheimer’s setting of 1980’s New York City is vivid and particular, co-starring in the novel rather than making cameo appearances. The total effect, whether or not the reader believes the heroine’s description of herself, is a novel that’s just plain likeable.

Amalie in Orbit has quite a cast of characters, and struggles to do them all justice. Like a fine ensemble, every character gets a chance to make his case to the reader: an elderly avante-garde composer, a promiscuous picketing son, a bumbling married love interest, a Nazi death camp survivor father and a fascist German office manager. Each moves to the conclusion of his or her own individual plot line. But Amalie is a different case.

Kirchheimer toys with the conventions of both literary and popular fiction, creating a novel that is readable but confusing. What is Amalie’s main conflict? Is it finding love after losing her husband? Is it fulfilling his last pet project by saving their building from ruthless developers? Is her struggle to guide her son away from or through his many misadventures into some sort of stable adulthood? All of these issues resolve themselves as speedily as the fifth act of a Shakespearean play, but they don’t seem important by the end of the novel.

Rather, Amalie in Orbit tries to focus, in the end, on the personal development of its main character. Amalie tries to convince the reader, or perhaps herself, that in taking advantage of the opportunities she is offered by the end of the novel to shape not only her destiny, but also the developing reality of the city around her—that she has had some kind of feminist epiphany. The problem is, one never really sees Amalie as the spineless mooch that she paints herself to be. She interacts with her frustratingly idealistic/clueless/father-idolizing son with astounding patience and cuts him loose pretty quickly when it becomes clear that their lives are moving in different directions. She deals with interoffice politics, sexual and otherwise, and emerges unscathed. The one true area of growth in the novel might be in her relationship with her distant, famous and sexist sociologist father when the truth about his early life breaks through her concept of him. In all, Amalie reads like a perfect heroine—from the beginning of the novel she is a woman the reader cares about and actually likes. The reader may not know where this novel is going, but each scene offers a new red herring plot line, keeping the reader wondering.

Amalie in Orbit may not be easy to quantify: literary or pop? But it’s infinitely enjoyable, quirky and convoluted, with a wit and grace that few novels can boast. Intellectual but not snobby, introspective but not self-obsessed, politically involved but not preachy, this is a novel that straddles multiple worlds in a rare and winning combination of the highbrow and the worldly.

Meghan Brinson holds an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. She served as poetry editor for Hayden's Ferry Review and as an international teaching fellow at the National University of Singapore. She has poems appearing or forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Gulf Coast, Greensboro Review and Pebble Lake Review. Her writing projects currently focus on landscapes and catastrophes.