Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Sunday February 6, 2011
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THE METROPOLIS CASE
Matthew Gallaway
Crown
ISBN 978-0307463425
372 pages
$25
Reviewed by Eugenia Zukerman
"Nothing meaningful is ever unveiled without great risk -- isn't that what you learned singing your opera?"
A botanist named Guillaume Marchand poses this question to his son, tenor Lucien Marchand. It's 1870, in Paris. Not only has Lucien sung the lead role in Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde," but he also owns an original score. That score plays a major role in a marvelously complex story.
Author Matthew Gallaway has taken a great risk with his first novel by creating an intricate, multilayered tale that slides from past to present, from Europe to New York, from opera to pop. But despite the complexity, "The Metropolis Case" engages the reader emotionally on every page.
A quartet of characters is at the center of the story: Lucien, the promising and conflicted singer; Anna, an impressive soprano from Pittsburgh who gives up a thriving international opera career in the mid-1960s to teach; Maria, a prickly young soprano who studies with Anna at Juilliard in the 1980s and is more than a student to her; and Martin, a disenchanted lawyer who has weathered Sept. 11 in New York and is ready to change his life.
But to describe the plot is to miss the point. Wagner's music, with its longing for love and transcendence, is what gives this story ballast and provides a guiding motive.
These four people's lives begin to intersect in strange and intriguing ways. While exploring the tragedies and duplicities that have shaped them, each one is severely tested, and each will surprise the reader. This is a story of operatic proportions, filled with coincidences, but it never seems overwrought or contrived.
The author's language is down-to-earth but never earthbound, and Gallaway's characters are passionate and funny. Maria, dubbed Morticia in second grade, tells a friend, "Here I am lying in bed with a shattered heart, and the truth is I'm freaking out because I haven't practiced in two days. That's not exactly normal, is it?" Martin, who gives up his law practice, proclaims, "Quitting is seriously underrated," and there's the conductor who wears "the expression of one savoring the first bite of a spectacular creme brulee."
Gallaway, like some of his characters, is from Pittsburgh, studied law and, although he played in a rock band, grew to love opera. Writing this superb novel, the author must have felt like Lucien after his first performance of "Tristan in Munich" in 1865, when "for the first time he understood the consummating power of performance and how -- as with romantic love -- he had grasped this only after years of searching, of craving something he could not have described until after it was found."
Eugenia Zukerman is a flutist, the author of four books, an arts administrator and the founder of ClassicalGenie.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE SIXTIES: Diaries, Volume Two: 1960-1969
Christopher Isherwood. Edited by Katherine Bucknell
Harper
ISBN 978-0061180194
756 pages
$39.99
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
Not for nothing did Christopher Isherwood coin the line "I am a camera." In this, the second volume of the British expat novelist and screenwriter's dairies, he takes the reader to the funeral of movie producer David ("Gone with the Wind") Selznick, at which Katharine Hepburn read Rudyard Kipling's poem "If." As Isherwood tells it, "When she got to the last line, she turned toward the coffin and said, '... You'll be a Man, my son!' I later heard that George Cukor thought this a supreme touch of artistry. I thought it farcical." Elsewhere, Don Bachardy, Isherwood's lover, lists which of their friends he finds it "fun to be with," the first three being Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and Tony Richardson -- two writers and a film director, all of such brilliance that it makes you wonder how Bachardy and Isherwood put up with ordinary mortals.
Isherwood's unflinching perceptiveness extends even to inanimate objects, as when he takes a hard look at the Watts Towers, those pieces of junk architecture that have become a Los Angeles landmark. He reminds us that the assembler, Simon Rodia, wasn't just a throwaway-item aesthete. It was fame he was after. "I had in mind to do something big," Isherwood quotes him as saying, "and I did."
Dennis Drabelle can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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