A COMIC EPIC IN PROSE
BOERNER, MARGARET
A COMIC ERIC IN PROSE Vikram Seth Pens a Genuine Novel By Margaret Boerner Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones, once famously defined the novel as a "comic epic in prose." This turns out to...
...Indeed, Seth's view is that many musicians are immature and their "maturity, such as it is, comes out through the interpretation of their music...
...It is a short book, in prose, employing the most traditional plot possible: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy goes through trials and regains girl—with the appropriate modern ironies...
...In an interview, Seth emphasized that he wanted the reader to discover Julia's deafness along with Michael: "Why lay a trail," he moaned, "if the book jacket gives it away...
...His teacher reacted with fury and impatience...
...Sheep come alive...
...But then, this is the plot of the vast majority of novels, from Tom Jones to Great Expectations to Ulysses, and, in all of them, the plot is merely the vehicle for the novelist's conception of manners, mores, and character...
...This is the sort of background from which dilettantes loom, and Seth has something of the dilettante's wide range...
...Brahms' A Minor begins...
...A concert generates a meeting...
...The musical themes in Seth's latest,An Equal Music, have appeared in his work before...
...Vikram Seth (rhymes with "gate") was born in Calcutta in 1952, the son of a shoe company executive and India's first woman judge...
...His inability ten years later to play the Art of the Fugue at the same time as Julia indicates Michael's continuing narcissism and immaturity...
...He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before coming to America to train as an economist at Stanford...
...The table of contents in The Golden Gate, for instance, runs: The world's discussed while friends are eating...
...as if one of the potential diamonds on his crown was proving itself to be merely carbon, convertible to its ideal form only under intense and continuous pressure...
...the novel as an art-form wants to end with more weddings than funerals...
...But he has nothing of the dilettante's shallowness, and his writing has continuously garnered plaudits...
...An Equal Music is told in the first person by the second violinist in the Mag-giore Quartet, who loves an ensemble pianist...
...And Michael has another love in an increasingly valuable violin he was lent by an old lady from his hometown when he first started serious competition...
...The months go by...
...Along the way, in 1982, he attended Nanjing University in China...
...The pianist Julia too undertakes to perform the Art of the Fugue in concert, because her increasing deafness prevents her from ensemble playing any more (and, the reader guesses, because she wants to compete on Michael's turf...
...novels tell stories rather than set moods...
...He applied it, and I crumbled...
...But that's the kind of thing to be expected of a "comic epic in prose...
...Although Julia is married and has a child, she agrees to tour Vienna and Venice with Michael's quartet...
...A speech is made...
...Together, Michael and Julia must confront the truth about their love for one another and their love for the music that brought them together...
...A house is warmed...
...Then came a collection of poems, The Humble Administrator's Garden, followed by The Golden Gate in 1986...
...The essence of their characters is that Michael and Julia are so competitive as performers, they cannot come together...
...Vines rest in early winter light...
...So energetic is Seth's style, in fact, that readers turned all 1,349 pages of his second novel, A Suitable Boy, without noticing how long it is...
...the world goes on...
...But Seth eschews sentimentality, and An Equal Music is no corny novelette...
...Revolving around four families, three Hindu and one Muslim, and sprawling across India, the novel uses its length to paint an epic depiction of, among other things, the life of Muslim women in purdah, everyday use of the Bhagavada Gita, the deference paid to caste, and the pomposities of new Indian judges, as well as the modernizing of shoe manufacturing and British Literature at a university...
...It's an epic, since it's not a lyric...
...In A Suitable Boy, Seth follows the example of Fielding, Thackery, and Trol-lope, turning a mother's search for a husband for her daughter into a set of interlocking stories...
...But when Julia contracts for the concert, Michael gets the string player's equivalent of stage fright and has to quit his quartet— just as, ten years earlier, he had had to quit Vienna and Julia because his third finger "responded slowly, and was only effective after a long warm-up...
...Set in San Francisco, the virtually unadvertised book spread by word of mouth among San Franciscans until it too was a best seller...
...A novel is prose, you see, because it's not poetry...
...The Winking Owl fills up by night...
...It is with considerable irony that Seth takes his title from John Donne's description of Heaven: "In that house they shall dwell, where there shall be no cloud nor sun, no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light, no noise nor silence but one equal music, no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession, no foes nor friends, but one equal communion and identity...
...From the blurb on its jacket, An Equal Music plays like An Equal Muzak: When an English quartet undertakes a challenging work of Beethoven's, violinist Michael Holme is overwhelmed by memories of mastering the piece as a student in Vienna...
...When Julia tried to talk Michael into staying in Vienna with his lessons, he found her defense of his teacher "an unbearable betrayal on her part...
...It is a novel made up of sonnets (a comic epic not in prose), born in an encounter with Alexander Pushkin's 1831 verse-novel Eugene One-gin and employing a fourteen-line stanza of iambic tetrameter lines (rather than the pentameter usual English sonnets...
...Friends meditate on friends who've gone...
...Fielding's definition does at least express the fact that when we pick up something labeled a "novel," we reasonably expect a story of human characters reacting to one another in social situations: meeting and parting, marrying and burying...
...And it's comic mostly in the sense that it isn't tragic...
...The brisk allegro...
...Olives are plucked in prime condition...
...A cache of billets-doux arrive...
...Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet won the Thomas Cook travel book award in 1983...
...Arrests occur...
...Phil's eyes are closed, but Paul is smiling, Floating on a slow tide of Brahms, Back in his absent mother's arms...
...Seth's plain style—characteristic of his prose as well—draws the reader directly to manner, mores, and character, with the short line charging the narrative with energy...
...So too, in A Suitable Boy, the heroine and an "unsuitable" boy disguise their romance by meeting at classical concerts...
...where he met Julia McNicholl, a pianist whose beauty was as mesmerizing as her musical genius, and Michael loved her with an intensity he never found again...
...Paul whispers, "That's the tune Mom hums...
...He cannot bear the probability of surrendering it to her heirs...
...Of course, in the end it turns out that his reward is permanent possession not of the girl but of his beloved fiddle...
...Here the blurb writers have betrayed the author...
...ravishing, beguiling . . . And on and on till silence comes...
...A quarrel is initiated...
...Each of these elements is routinely violated by books we'd all want to call novels, but what else is there to say about the genre...
...For the larger audience of readers, The Golden Gate was Seth's breakthrough volume...
...But the novelist Vikram Seth is one of those few...
...A cat reacts to competition...
...There is a more important trail to follow...
...The real secret is that its lovers love music above all else...
...Rather than being a love story, then, An Equal Music is a novel of growing up, a bildungsroman in which the date of maturity has crept up to thirty-seven years old...
...An old affair is renovated...
...In some ways, An Equal Music is the least interesting of Seth's works...
...When A Suitable Boy appeared in 1993, it sold over a million copies, even though the book is a 1,349-page novel set in India shortly after independence and centered on a young woman's difficulties in choosing whom to marry while dealing with the demands of kin, caste, and love...
...Curiously, here in 1999, exactly 250 years after Fielding's Tom Jones appeared, there seem to be very few among the innumerable authors publishing ostensible novels in English who still remember this minimal requirement for what a novel is supposed to do...
...Coffee is drunk, and Scrabble played...
...Michael Holme's only chance at obtaining "one equal communion" with Julia requires that he accept her as a deaf soloist...
...A Suitable Boy takes us back to the beginnings of the novel in English, where the panorama of life can be surveyed in the course of getting two young people married...
...Now they're returning Throats clear...
...greatest pleasure: an opportunity to live for a few hours in another person's life...
...His new book, An Equal Music—a tale of no-longer-young musicians trying to rekindle the passion they had known as students—is not quite up to the level of his previous work...
...Now, years later, a chance encounter reunites them and their passion is reawakened...
...Readers can don different selves, become voyeurs, experience possible lives, and feel unimagined emotional climaxes—^with-out incurring a punch on the nose, a term in jail, or a new family to support...
...Indeed, one of the pleasures of reading fiction is its concentration on how "real people" think and act...
...In the last stages of the novel, the Mag-giore Quartet lands a lucrative contract to record Bach's Art of the Fugue...
...Then a yearning Warm ductile length of lyric spins Its lovely glimmering thread at leisure Inveiglingly from measure to measure With a continuous tenderness So deep it smoothes out all distress, All sorrow...
...The sonnet 3.37 from The Golden Gate, for instance, describes a musician's son reacting to Brahms: The lights have dimmed...
...In commenting on his protagonist, Seth describes Michael's behavior as "dubious...
...This turns out to be a surprisingly negative definition, when you think about it...
...But she carries with her a heartbreaking secret: She is gradually going deaf...
...But it's still enough of a genuine novel to offer the novel reader's Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University...
Vol. 4 • June 1999 • No. 37
