More than two decades ago, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Elizabeth Strout, wrote a blurb for the contemporary fiction writer Beverly Gologorsky, then the author of Stop Here (2013) her second novel about working class characters published by Seven Stories. “Gologorsky looks straight into the face of class in this country,” Stout wrote. Seven Stories is still using those words to promote Gologorsky’s most recent work of fiction, The Angle of Falling Light (2025). Strout’s blurb is too good not to use again and again, but it doesn’t do justice to The Angle, which approaches class obliquely not directly.

As Gologorsky’s six works of fiction show, there’s more than one way to tell a good story about class: from the woman’s angle, the soldier’s angle, the opioid addict’s angle, which plays a major role in her latest work, and also from the angle of loneliness. Still, Strout’s words might mislead readers looking for class-conscious and class obsessed characters caught up in dramatic class conflicts.

It’s not that there isn’t class-related stuff in The Angle. Several of the characters have dead end jobs, go to work and belong to the precariat. But class is not the dominant chord that the author strikes. The “point of production,” as economists call it, isn’t the principal setting. More often than not, Gologorsky situates her characters in bedrooms, bars, kitchens and on a beach on Long Island where the population is divided between summer people and year-round people, a significant distinction in the narrative.

What causes the year-round people, the major characters, their emotional and psychological pain, including the pain of acute depression and loneliness, aren’t working conditions, lousy wages, a boss or exploitation, but rather their own denials and self-destructive behaviors. Like the characters in Barbara Kingsolver 2024 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Demon Copperfield —set in opioid Appalachia and an homage to Charles Dickens —many of the characters in The Angle are hooked on pills.

The novel might be regarded as a fractured homage to Jane Austen —the only author mentioned by name in The Angle— who delineated English social classes in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, which begins famously, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Perhaps as true a statement in 2025 as it was in 1813 when Austen was 21.

One of the novel’s minor characters, a fellow named Greg, asks Tessa, the first person “I” narrator, and protagonist, “What are you reading?” She says, “Jane Austen” and adds, “Austen advises men of their flaws so politely, nary a curse word passes her mouth.” The same cannot be said for Gologorsky and her characters who can and do curse. The author of The Angle goes far beyond politeness and impoliteness and skewers men not only for bad manners but also for blatant varieties of misogyny. Curiously or perhaps not, Jane Austen readers are celebrating this year the 250th anniversary of her birth on December 16, 1775. Tessa belongs to the family of Austen fans. And perhaps Gologorsky does, too. So there is more than one way the novel is timely and relevant.

The characters, male and female, are alone and lonely; the narrator and main character Tessa, rightly wonders, “Is my life so unpeopled?” It’s an unusual word. It’s not “unpeople,” which means to remove humans which is what’s happening in Gaza. Tessa’s life is often unpeopled, though she has family, friends and companions. Her loneliness is the loneliness born of the crowd. The vital connection in her life isn’t to another human being. but rather to a camera which enables her to become a photographer, to adopt a point of view that’s liberating and that also helps her escape from the kind of depressed, addled and isolated life that destroyed her own sister and that threatens to destroy her.

“Now I have the camera,” she exclaims as though she’s won the key to her freedom. In these pages, characters belong to a dark world in which they struggle to evade the “nothingness of everything” and the “fucking desert of fuck ups.” The deserts that matter most here are the fuck-up deserts of domestic life, not the hot sandy deserts of Iraq, though some of the characters are veterans of the wars the U.S. military fought in the deserts of the Middle East where soldiers became addicts. “Always, we could take another sip, drag, or snort,” one veteran explains. “That’s what we did when we weren’t killing or being killed.” State-side, the hospital wards are “filled with wounded soldiers” that leave emotional holes in the heart of a waitress and a mother who aims to protect her daughters against a ravenous world that would entrap them and exploit them. Nearly every character is a member of the platoon of the walking wounded.

At Christmas (yes, this is in part a Christmas novel) one character thinks that if he were to go out of his house, “Other people’s revelry would only deepen the aloneness” that he feels. The only song that’s sung in the novel is the Beatles “Eleanor Rigby.” One of the characters hears the line, “all the lonely people” which makes him want to be with people, but he doesn’t reach out to another human being Alone and in the solitude of his room, he switches on the radio, and turns the dial. Gologorsky writes “nothing pleases, switches it off. He prefers to be in his head.” So, too, Tessa prefers to be in her head as she wanders about Manhattan and the Bronx with its racist graffiti and depressing apartments.

Despite the caveat about cursing, Gologorsky has more in common with the author of Pride and Prejudice than might meet the casual eye. Like Austen, she’s attentive to manners and morals, with bad manners a sign of a lack of clear moral standards. Like Austen, Gologorsky is a novelist of domestic life, closely observed details and the kinds of social clashes that unfold at home, not on distant battlefields. Characters die but no one is shot and killed; there are no explosions and no chases on foot or by car.

The narrative shifts profoundly when an elderly woman slips on a patch of ice, injures herself and is hospitalized. That’s the kind of Austen-like dramatic action that generates emotional charges in The Angle.

The novel comes closest to, say, Pride and Prejudice, when Tessa becomes romantically involved with Greg, a young doctor from a wealthy New York family, who owns a comfortable Manhattan apartment and who, like the gentlemen in an Austen novel, seeks a wife. But marriage to him is not an option for Tessa who is determined to carve out her own path in a world in which fragility and unpredictability rule. She means to “enjoy everything before it disappears.” At the end of the narrative, the “first blood streaks of sun appear in the sky.” Tessa stops “to watch the darkness fade away.” It’s not a Jane Austen happy ending, but it’s the only ending that Gologorsky can honestly provide in an unpeopled and lonely world. If you want a timely and entertaining novel about alienated and addicted Americans this is it.

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