OLIVETTI, by Allie Millington
Typewriters — the manually powered writing machines once made by Remington, Underwood and Royal — are wondrous things.
To see their magic in action, try this trick: Set a typewriter out on a table with a sheet of paper pre-rolled into its carriage, and wait. Nearly every child, and many adults, will be drawn to the beauty and specificity of the machine. They will just have to type something. A thought. A complaint. A poem. A wish.
The keys, knobs and levers of typewriters were made to do one thing, and one thing only: draw out words we each carry within us that have the potential to create meaning, achieve permanence.
In her debut novel, Allie Millington takes such magic a step further. Her titular character, a midcentury Lettera 22 (called Olivetti, after the company that made him), is a sentient if stationary being who — like so many teddy bears, action figures and sock puppets in children’s literature and pop culture — can worry, remember, love and fear. Olivetti lives, which is a boon to the Brindle family, particularly their quietly troubled 12-year-old, Ernest.
Good lord, what 12-year-old boy isn’t troubled? Ernest’s parents have been sending him to a therapist whom he calls Dr. Round-a-bout, because the doctor’s questions go in circles: “And how do you think you feel about how you think about how you’re feeling?” His place in the family pecking order (third of the four kids) means his problems tend to be noted as afterthoughts. And his habit of isolating himself (on the roof of their apartment building with his thick, red Oxford English Dictionary, which he reads entry by entry: “Apologize. Apology. Apoplexy. Apostle. Apostrophe”) is dismissed as antisocial behavior. Why can’t he be enthralled with his phone like his siblings?
Ernest is the Brindle most burdened by cares and worries, not the least of which is “Everything That Happened,” a phrase he hears constantly from the adults in his life. (“Everything That Happened” is shorthand for an all-too-common family crisis that has already visited the Brindles.)
Then, when his mother, Beatrice Brindle, doesn’t come home one afternoon, having vanished for no apparent reason, Ernest’s life is thrown into a new, disturbing chaos: MISSING posters; visits with the police; his frazzled father’s attempts to deal with way too much; his siblings’ squawking and fighting; conversations with the building’s Brazilian super, the local librarian and the owner of the corner pawnshop.
The solid and pragmatic Quinn, daughter of the pawnshop’s owner, is a welcome helpmate, and foil, for Ernest. She’s a different kind of 12-year-old, a girl who has made peace with her own “Everything That Happened.”
The novel is narrated, in alternating chapters, by Olivetti and Ernest. The Lettera 22 takes the lead, introducing himself and steering the first three chapters.
Olivetti has resided with the Brindles (“a copper-colored family with eyes as rich as ink”), he tells us, ever since Beatrice pulled him from a cardboard box and set him on her desk. For years, she has been recording her hopes and dreams on the vintage machine. “Her Tapestries, she called them, not just because of the way she tried to weave her words into something beautiful and bigger, but because of all the noise we made together. Tap, tap, tap.”
Olivetti remembers every word she has typed. How could a typewriter forget what the human heart pours into its workings?
Beatrice turned to Olivetti as one does to the perfect friend, who knows that listening is often the best thing a friend can do, even if that friend is a writing mechanism made in Italy in 1950. As such, Olivetti was the last one to see Beatrice before she disappeared.
Millington captures the essence of why typewriters are such extraordinary creations, and why everyone should have one: Olivetti takes no side, shakes no finger. (A typewriter simply reflects what you put into it.) And he cares.
So when Ernest tracks down Olivetti, inexplicably pawned by Beatrice for $126 (remember that amount), and begins tearfully typing on him, desperate to communicate with her, Olivetti does the unthinkable: He types back. “Do not be alarmed. … I am Olivetti. … I can help you.”
By communicating with a human being, he breaks the prime rule of all typewriters, to the horror of his pawnshop pal, Remi, a 1947 Remington Deluxe Model 5. “But some humans,” Olivetti assures us, “are worth breaking the rules for.”
Millington’s writing does us a great favor. Her Olivetti is neither an automaton nor a pushover — there is a painful and problematic crisis in the house he has called home and his voice drives the action with compassion. Ernest speaks with a confusion and simmering panic recognizable to anyone who was once 12, loved their mother deeply and feared for her life.
The conclusion is nearly impossible to divine and yet so perfect it includes that most tactile of memories: a 12-hour family road trip, covering a distance of, well, $126.
What comes after that exemplifies the best of Millington’s literary imagination. The Brindles will go on confronting “Everything,” with hope, gusto and all the unity they can muster. They will set the family table for seven, with a place for Olivetti; put paper in his carriage, and wait.
OLIVETTI | By Allie Millington | (Ages 8 to 12) | Feiwel & Friends | 256 pp. | $17.99
