BOOK REVIEW : Mechanics of Misplaced Loyalty Drive ‘The Last Studebaker’ : THE LAST STUDEBAKER <i> by Robin Hemley</i> , Graywolf Press, $20; 248 pages

Lois Walters, a native of South Bend, Ind., remembers clearly the day the Studebaker car company went out of business. Her father had worked there for 20 years, and although Rudy pretended otherwise, the demise of Studebaker had turned him into a desperate and humiliated man.

Lois can barely contain her anger, decades later, when she comes across a photograph of the car-making family, furious that the city “kept lionizing the Studebakers, like nothing had really happened in 1963, like the company hadn’t just ditched the town.”

Lois thinks South Bend “should have done with Studebaker what they did at the sites of horrendous airplane crashes”--namely, “sow a ton of nails into the crash site to discourage scavengers.”

Loyalty, generally undeserved, is a major theme in this first novel by Robin Hemley, author of the short story collection “All You Can Eat” and a teacher of creative writing at the University of North Carolina.

There’s Rudy’s misplaced loyalty toward his employer, of course, which has its counterpart in his relationship with his wife, Lois’ mother: Unable to deal with Rudy’s denial, she takes the kids and leaves her husband, for good, from a Stuckey’s parking lot.

Lois appears to take after Rudy, for she seems unable to say goodby to her ex-husband, Willy, although he’s taken up with another woman and is manifestly more loyal to his cars than to either friends or family--his favorite cars being Studebakers, naturally, of which he has collected dozens of rusted-out examples.

And then there’s Henry, who hasn’t been the same since the car accident that killed his girlfriend and her son: He was at the wheel, angry and impatient, wanting to dump her, when he hit a truck head on. Once cocksure, Henry is unable to believe in anything at all, certainly not in cars.

The central relationship in “The Last Studebaker” is the one between Henry and Lois, a friendship precipitated by Henry’s returning to the house he owns but, after the accident, cannot bear to live in.

Lois is living there with her two daughters, Willy having just kicked them out, and although she is initially reluctant to let Henry stay, she soon recognizes that he, too, is a refugee. Henry does little but hang around the house, at night sleeping in the garage, while Lois spends most of her days at garage sales, looking for “something worth collecting, something that didn’t work now and might never work until doomsday, but something she could care about and fret over and make valuable simply by giving it her undivided devotion.”

It’s pretty obvious where this novel is headed, given Hemley’s hammering away at the idea that cars and car-culture--read, more broadly, materialism--bring little satisfaction and much grief.

And “The Last Studebaker” can get heavy-handed, as when Hemley mentions not once but twice that Evangeline Studebaker, the last member of the clan to grow up in the family mansion, died of exposure, in her very own home, despite her wealth.

What Evangeline leaves behind, among countless other objects, is a 1931 canary-yellow Studebaker President Roadster, and its sale at auction provides the book with a fitting climax. To identify the car’s buyer would give away far too much, but even the most inattentive reader will guess that this particular Studebaker will not survive the book unscathed.

“The Last Studebaker” is a congenial, unpretentious novel, and one interesting thing about it is that two of the most compelling characters are Lois’ children, Meg and Gail. (Don’t jump to hasty conclusions about the author, for Robin Hemley is male.)

Willy and Henry are opposite sides of the same coin, and Lois and Rudy are very much alike; Gail and Meg, by contrast, are very much their own people, doing the rash, neo-adult things that 16- and 11-year-olds, respectively, do.

Gail in particular is a piece of work, constantly torturing Meg and Lois, never apologizing (except once) for her inflammatory behavior and generally acting like the quintessentially disaffected teen-ager. If Gail were any more independent, thinks Lois, “she could start issuing her own currency.”

But we know quite well that when push comes to shove, as it does in the final pages of “The Last Studebaker,” she’ll do the right thing.