Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday October 22, 2010
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LISTEN TO THIS
Alex Ross
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978-0374187743
364 pages
$27
Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
There's a huge amount to admire in this collection of essays about music, but not quite enough to love. Alex Ross -- the widely honored author of "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century" -- writes for the New Yorker, and sometimes it shows. All the pieces are marvels of research and reporting, but at least half of them feel a little solemn, over-edited and just mildly pedantic.
Some of this flattening almost certainly results from a reporting and writing style often associated with our country's most revered magazine: "According to "The Guinness Book of Records," Vincent La Selva, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, is the only man ever to have conducted all twenty-eight operas of Giuseppe Verdi in chronological order." How many times in the New Yorker have we read an opening sentence structured just like that one? It could have been written by Janet Flanner or St. Clair McKelway back in 1937.
Ross' essays themselves embrace almost every aspect of music, and for this he deserves all honor. In particular, he cogently argues that we need to ignore the artificial boundaries between contemporary pop and classical, that we should pay attention to ambitious music no matter what its source or how it's marketed. As a result, "Listen to This" includes pieces on concert hall oldies but goodies such as Mozart, Schubert and Brahms but also on contemporary pop gods like Bob Dylan, Bjork and Radiohead.
As a writer, Ross seldom repeats himself. He profiles the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who championed contemporary composers during his tenure at the Los Angeles Philharmonic; reports on Western music in China; and re-creates life at Vermont's Marlboro Music under its current directors, the pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode. In other pieces, he reflects on the impact of vinyl records and later audio technology on performance practice, interviews young people bringing the chamber repertory to a poor neighborhood in Providence, R.I., and talks to John Luther Adams about his experimental sound and light installations: In Adams' "The Place," for example, "information from seismological, meteorological and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into a luminous field of electronic sound."
In general, the more Ross lets himself into his writing, the better. In a winning introduction, he tells us about his early passion for Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony and his devotion to Leonard Bernstein's "The Joy of Music" and "The Infinite Variety of Music," which he calls "the best introductory books of their kind." In nearly the last piece in "Listen to This," he declares his flat-out adoration for Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. "She was the most remarkable singer I ever heard." (Full disclosure: I, too, worship at the LHL chapel. ) His pieces on Marian Anderson and the community music efforts in Providence are deeply moving. And he knows every sort of non-commercial music so well that, in a brief piece about Kurt Cobain, he can sum up an era with virtuosic ease:
"Alternative music in the 1990s claimed descent from the punk-rock movement that crisscrossed America in the seventies and eighties. The claim rang false because punk in its pure form disavowed commercial success, a disavowal that united an otherwise motley array of youth subcultures: high-school misfits, skateboard kids, hardcore skinheads, doped-out postcollegiate slackers. Punk's obsession was autonomy -- independent labels, clubs installed in suburban garages and warehouses, flyers and fanzines photocopied at temp jobs after hours. Some of the music was vulgar and dumb, some of it ruggedly inventive; rock finally had a viable avant-garde."
In truth, Ross can be so warmly enthusiastic about innovative musicmaking that he leaves you willing to try even the most arcane composers, people who make Gyorgy Ligeti and Philip Glass look like Handel and Bach. And, given his passion for the digital -- he speaks of transferring the "Complete Mozart Edition" to his iPod -- Ross offers a "free audio companion" to his book at www.therestisnoise.com/listentothis, where you can find "streaming samples arranged by chapter, along with links to audio-rich websites and other channels of direct access to the music." This, too, obviously enhances the usefulness of "Listen to This."
Nonetheless, Ross' prose needs an injection of bluegrass or rockabilly; it needs to swing a little, to lose the Olympian tone. At times one even yearns for something like the primal screams emitted by the St. Lawrence Quartet during performances of R. Murray Schafer's Third Quartet. In his more biographical or historical pieces, Ross trudges dutifully through a life or a musical idea, while citing dozens of scholarly books along the way. Myriad references and sources abound in his endnotes: He carefully lists the dates of all the Radiohead concerts he attended. At such moments Ross sometimes calls to mind a driven but slightly insecure A(plus sign) student. In his most ambitious piece, "Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues," he traces the recurrence over 400 years of a characteristic note pattern, one that evokes "the gait of a lost soul." It reads like a somewhat showoffy term paper, but then I couldn't quite follow large parts of it.
The ordinary person is also likely to bristle, at least a bit, at the casual mention of weeks in China, months following Dylan around, attendance at concerts in Berlin and Alaska and everywhere in between. One note says, "I interviewed Bjork in Reykjavik in January 2004; in Salvador, Brazil, in February; in London in April; and in New York that summer." And how did you spend your 2004?
Alex Ross is still a relatively young man, just entering his 40s. He's enjoyed much -- and much-deserved -- success, capped in 2008 by a MacArthur Grant. He clearly works geekily hard, and all the pages of "Listen to This" are unquestionably insightful and informative -- but they'd be even better if Ross or his editors allowed his sentences out on the dance floor a little. As it is, they're too correctly dressed and polite to win the reader's undying affection. For real zing in writing about music, you'll need to go back to the great but also gloriously crotchety and idiosyncratic George Bernard Shaw, B.H. Haggin, Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem and Robert Craft, as well as Greil Marcus and Amiri Baraka. Every one of these writers took risks, and sometimes made a fool of himself. Like most of the artists and critics who matter, they all adopted pianist Artur Schnabel's superb motto: "Safety last."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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NEMESIS
Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0547318356
280 pages
$26
Reviewed by Roxana Robinson, who is most recently the author of "Cost," which was named one of the five best novels of 2008 by The Washington Post.
For decades, Philip Roth has written the long narrative of the Jewish American experience, shining on it the light of his considerable intelligence. His latest book, "Nemesis," addresses a biological threat to his community in the 1940s.
It's difficult, now, to imagine the terror that polio once roused, but by the early 1950s there were 58,000 new cases in America and no cure. Some victims recovered, some suffered permanent disabilities, and some were paralyzed in the lungs and succumbed to the disease. Antibiotics eliminated other childhood illnesses, but polio raged on. This is the historical context for "Nemesis," which recounts an outbreak of polio in 1944 in Roth's hometown of Newark. Here the disease carries cultural as well as medical import.
"The first case of polio that summer came early in June ... in a poor Italian neighborhood crosstown from where we lived. Over in the ... Jewish Weequahic section, we heard nothing about it." The Jewish section hears soon enough. Bucky Cantor, a young phys ed instructor, is the director of a summer sports program in Weequahic, and in the arresting opening scene, Italian toughs arrive at his playground. Swaggering and hostile, the Italians announce their intent: "We're spreadin' polio. ... We got it and you don't, so we thought we'd drive up and spread a little around." While the Jewish kids watch, the Italian spits on the sidewalk, sending "a gob of viscous sputum (that) splattered ... only inches from the tip of Mr. Cantor's sneakers." This attack is not suffered meekly: Brave Bucky Cantor faces down the Italians, calls the police and swabs down the sidewalk with disinfectant. He does everything right -- perfectly, in fact -- but the march of disease, like that of discrimination, is irrational. One person's best efforts won't stem the tide.
Polio invades the quiet neighborhood of Weequahic. "'Our Jewish children are our riches,' someone said. 'Why is it attacking our beautiful Jewish children?'" At first, Cantor is a source of strength for the community, but as fear infects him, he loses moral conviction, quits his job and abandons the kids. He heads for a job at a summer camp in the uncontaminated Catskills, where his girlfriend works. As the epidemic rages through the Jewish neighborhood, anti-Semitic murmurings are reported. All this takes place against the grim backdrop of wartime Europe.
The idea of disease as weapon is sinister and electrifying, particularly when used against an ethnic group. This sort of warfare could provide a mirror to reflect our hidden cultural fault lines, and it's a rich philosophical premise for a novel. Roth, however, chooses not to explore it. The culture wars are left behind when Cantor arrives in the Jewish camp. In fact, once the shift is made to the Catskills, the tension diminishes and the pace slows. The place itself is given only a perfunctory description. Roth is lovingly attentive to Newark, but evokes the rural landscape in cliches: "This was the wide-open spaces. Here the vista was limitless." Much of the dialogue is wooden and long-winded, delivering information through ponderous monologues.
Bucky's girlfriend, Marcia, is a two-dimensional character whose main appeal lies in "the allure of her petite figure" and her sexual urgency. "Undress me, please. Undress me now," she begs Cantor. Apart from lackluster sex scenes, from here on the narrative is set in a more limited and less compelling arena of men's athletics, men's friendships and men's interlocking networks of responsibility. The final scene, back in Newark, offers an elegiac reprise of Bucky's earlier heroic presence, but this doesn't make up for the long, flat sections set in camp.
The book's most serious flaw, however, is not its flagging energy but an odd lacuna that occurs in many of Roth's books. His work is rich with philosophical inquiry, deep with intellectual exploration, but lacking in emotional range. He seems unable to write convincingly of the drama at the center of our lives: a deep, vital and passionate commitment to another person. Roth doesn't create a loving bond that's both intellectual and erotic, one that entails trust and respect as well as carnal intent. He writes tenderly about the family, but only from the viewpoint of a son or grandson; he writes with little depth or understanding about wives, girlfriends or mistresses. Absent from his work is that lifelong dialogue between lovers, the chronicle of their fierce struggle to engage on every level.
Roth's women characters are presented primarily as sexual partners. He seems unable to create a woman whom he loves (except as a mother) or for whom he feels a sympathy we could share. His male protagonists are often misogynistic, and their intentions toward women simplistic. Such a limited view might appear lively and interesting in a cocky young writer with his life ahead of him, but over time it becomes tedious. An author's work should reveal the shifts in understanding and the rise in wisdom that age might confer, but Roth's shows no such learning curve.
To be a great writer, you needn't be a good person, but you must know how it feels to be one: You must be able to write Desdemona. To be a great writer, you needn't be in love, but you must know what it means: You must know how Achilles feels about Patroclus. Roth seems unable to create -- or even to understand -- the powerful emotional engine that drives the greatest fiction that we know.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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YOU LOST ME THERE
Rosecrans Baldwin
Riverhead
ISBN 978 1 59448 763 7
296 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Fiona Zublin
In "You Lost Me There," the first novel by North Carolina author Rosecrans Baldwin, grief seems like a puzzle to be solved, but it turns out to be as complicated and unknowable as the Atlantic Ocean, as our own brains.
Dr. Victor Aaron is an aging Alzheimer's researcher whose wife, Sara, has died. He lives on an island in a foggy New England town (the fog, you see, is a metaphor). Early fears that this might degenerate into one of those stories about an older man lamenting his lost vitality by sleeping with younger women are happily allayed. Instead, it's about a man deteriorating, so incapable of grief that he shuts down, so focused on memories of his perfect marriage that he forgets what really happened.
Over and over again, Victor, his sometime lover, Regina, and his goddaughter, Cornelia, analyze their lives and come up with misconceptions. All these characters are smart people who just miss out on insight, often because they're determined to acknowledge the superficiality of their lives and love affairs. They understand that there are no new stories, but they forget that nothing is simple, least of all the cliches that make up human life.
Although "You Lost Me There" is moving and genuine, it's not always enjoyable. Baldwin is not writing about the kind of sadness that can sweep us away, the Heathcliff-banging-his-forehead-on-a-tree kind of grief. The sadness in these pages is about the emotional inadequacy that everyone feels, that total loneliness that overtakes us despite love and family, and the ultimate fear of losing our faculties, losing what makes us who we are.
After early intimations that this might be a story about true love torn asunder by death, the bleakness is tough to confront. There's romance, Victor says when describing a Dvorak sonata, "but more important, there was wretchedness underneath."
Baldwin's prose is wise and nimble, clever without being self-conscious, true to the myriad voices of his characters. Though most of the novel is told by Victor, we get snatches of prose in Sara's voice, which Baldwin does so nicely that it's frustrating that we get to hear from her only a few times. Like Victor, we want more of her, but she gets lost in the fog, too.
Fiona Zublin is a writer and editor for the Washington Post Express.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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