Playing the Wrong Chords
WALTHER, GARY
Playing the Wrong Chords The Distant Music of Summer By James T. Maher Little, Brown. 308 pp. $9.95. Reviewed by Gary Walther In this first novel, James T. Maher attempts to portray the...
...He even punches the nose of a priest who tries to prevent him from leaving Mass early...
...But this never really happens...
...Into a numinous world of elegance and wonder...
...He could still hear the music...
...These feelings often lead him into some fairly purple passages...
...All of a sudden the whole world seemed to be filled up with him...
...Reviewed by Gary Walther In this first novel, James T. Maher attempts to portray the painful changes and bittersweet separations that accompany the passage from childhood into adolescence...
...A similar lack of subtlety hampers the dialogue...
...She's too nice to everybody...
...Richard's sister Kathleen, who has done nothing but attend Catholic Sodality meetings during most of the novel, suddenly feels the onset of puberty and tells Richard she doesn't want him to hold her hand or touch her anymore...
...Peg O'Malley decides to return to Ohio State...
...And most pertinent, how does one respond when childhood begins to die...
...Like a whirlwind, isn't he...
...Maher shows us plenty of clobbering, but he never really explores the painful adjustments required as people grow and change...
...These questions are simply obscured by the book's misty nostalgia and set-piece romance...
...Richard throughout remains in the familiar confines of his cocoon-like existence in Glenwood...
...One expects, therefore, that his presence will somehow change Richard, perhaps by introducing conflict with Richard's mother, Margaret...
...Maher has the germ of a good story in the relationship between the two boys, but he fails to develop the dramatic tensions necessary to make the tale come alive...
...Peg is finally revealing that she suspected as much when Maher breaks in with this bit of abstract lather: "The net of words filled the air and bound them fast, the sound of their voices seeming to issue from a single throat, a single breath long drawn out -words not so much spoken as forced from them by the presence of their inner silences...
...Set during the Depression, in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood of Glenwood, a suburb of Cleveland, The Distant Music of Summer covers four summers in the life of Richard Mulcahy and his best friend Matt Collins...
...he never made advances to Peg, he did to Richard...
...Both boys, however, share a struggle with a Catholicism inflicted on them at a young age...
...The pair make an odd couple...
...And there, an orchestra-polished, urbane, romantic -played in an eternal middle distance...
...What sort of anxieties are experienced at the onset of adolescence when the first separations from home begin to occur...
...At one point Richard and his confidant, Peg O'Malley, an Ohio State senior on a leave of absence from school, are talking about Peg's recently-ended relationship with a man...
...Matt, for example, represents a world of boyhood experience forbidden to Richard: He curses, he collects pictures of naked women, he drinks...
...One of these days she's going to get clobbered, and that'll wake her up...
...Richard, sent in early childhood to a Catholic boarding school-where the nuns terrified him with tales of the devil-learns to retreat into himself, to use obedience as a means of attaining anonymity...
...Richard, who is 10 when the story begins, is every mother's ideal son-dutiful, respectful, sensitive, precocious...
...With total contempt for Catholic authority, he dismisses priests and and nuns as an unholy alliance intent on squashing the individual...
...At one point in the novel, Matt Collins looks at Kathleen Mulcahy and tells Richard, "She lives in a dream world...
...Tough breaks for a 13-year-old kid...
...Listening...
...Nevertheless, Richard's interior fantasy world will get him through, Maher implies: "He sat down on the edge of the bed and kept absolutely quiet...
...In the course of 20 pages, Richard's world simply collapses...
...Here is Richard listening to a freight train: "The deep rumbling of the long string of cars echoed through the valley...
...Matt is rough, rebellious, impulsive...
...Indeed, Maher is unabashedly sentimental about Richard-And, one suspects, nostalgic about boyhood in general...
...He smiled in the dark...
...Mournful...
...The two are slowly, warily approaching the fact that the man was a homosexual...
...Maher is perhaps most heavy handed in the novel's conclusion, which reads like a soap opera...
...Richard slipped away into the distant music of summer...
...There, debonair men and beautiful women stepped out of a Leyen-decker painting into custom-built Duesenberg town cars and were driven to their moonlit yachts...
...A sound filled with distances and time...
...A soft, dark thunder...
...and his mother casually mentions that she is thinking of moving to a remote suburb...
...He loves sleek Duesenberg cars, speedboats, and above all, music...
...Matt drowns during a fierce thunderstorm (an awkward surprise, since the reader expects him to die at the hands of the gangsters he naively became involved with...
...a character remarks after Matt makes one of his rapid entrances and exits...
...Matt fights more directly...
...Instead of allowing meaning to grow from the interplay of character, Maher hovers about, inserting intrusive-And labored-Authorial commentary...
...What happens when the old cozy neighborhood becomes narrow and stifling...
...The Irish have a word for this view of life-malarkey...
Vol. 62 • November 1979 • No. 22
