Valeria's Last Stand

We probably won't be seeing octogenarians in underwear ads anytime soon, but seniors are becoming something of a trend in the publishing world. Author Henry Alford recently paid homage to old folks' wisdom in his book How to Live. Bob Morris helped his crotchety right-wing widower father find a date in Assisted Loving. Now, Brooklyn author Marc Fitten has fashioned a sweet-as-pie novel, titled Valeria's Last Stand, out of the comings and goings of geriatric busybodies in a backwater Hungarian village.

Fitten pins his fable on three pensioner-age codgers—a sharp-tongued spinster named Valeria, a white-haired lothario known simply as "the potter" and an alluring bar owner named Ibolya. In Fitten's madcap hamlet, it's never too late to find tender love (or reckless hate). It is in these quiet moments of striving that Valeria reignites the passion of her youth, the potter creates his greatest work of art (a statue of Valeria at the village's new train station), and Ibolya learns that there is more to life than selling booze to the town's slack-jawed drunks. The plot is the opposite of a thriller, but it's the low-intensity nature of the characters' conflicts and triumphs that gives Fitten's book its fairy-tale charm.

The simplicity of this self-enclosed world is markedly free of contemporary anxieties. These citizens are not worried about things like economic meltdowns, global terrorism and the greenhouse effect so much as they're concerned with scoring free beer at the tavern. But even with his light touch, Fitten clearly believes in the transforming power of wrinkly love, and this is what makes his protagonists' final quests resonate.—Drew Toal

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