Books
Ghost world
by Jolisa Gracewood
__Dead People's Music__ lays family phantoms to rest.
Dead People’s Music is that rare and lovely thing: a first novel that doesn’t try too hard. Faint praise? Au -contraire: this is a work of subtlety and charm. With understated skill, Sarah Laing, author of the short-story collection Coming Up Roses, explores the complicated art of taking what you’re given – in this case, musical talent and a double-edged family legacy – and (forgive the American Idol phraseology) making it your own.
The tidily constructed story revolves around Rebecca, a 30ish New Zealander newly arrived in New York with Toby, her web-programmer boyfriend. A cellist, classically trained in London, Rebecca has turned her back on the “dead people’s music” of the title. Instead, she is working on an avant-garde song cycle about the grandmother she never knew: Klara, who was also a gifted cellist.
Klara, as we discover in intermittent chapters, was dispatched to New York City with her sister, Esther, while their parents remained in Germany to rescue other Jewish children. After the war, she meets a New Zealander in Central Park and capriciously marries him. But in -suburban Wellington, her heritage marks her as irrevocably alien, and her talent languishes while she cares for her child.
Amid postwar prosperity, Klara is tormented by her parents’ unspeakable fate, “the thought of her beautiful mother, her nails broken and dirty, her flesh starved off her … Mama, mama, mama, she intoned to the stroke of the emery board”. She retreats from her intolerant antipodean in-laws to her bedroom, where she listens for “that strange owl they said was calling for pork”; it’s a passing observation that beautifully captures the bitterness of Klara’s situation.
A third strand of the novel re-visits Rebecca’s coming of age in 1990s -Wellington and London. Music is her life – she learns on Klara’s cello, and ardently embraces the local band scene and -British new wave – until she is blindsided by a diagnosis of diabetes. Grappling with the sudden impediment to her carefree youth, she plots her musical future while nursing a crush on her cello teacher’s broodingly handsome son, Bruno.
The three stories converge in the present-day narrative in New York, where Rebecca finally makes contact with her great-aunt Esther and faces her own guilt about squandering Klara’s legacy, simultaneously dealing with Bruno’s sudden reappearance and Toby’s jealousy. Laing keeps things low-key, avoiding grandiose revelations: Rebecca works her way towards satisfyingly ordinary solutions, not without ambivalence, but with a grudging concession to life’s ragged edges.
Coincidentally, this book shares plot points with some recent New -Zealand fiction. A musician in search of family scattered by the Holocaust, as in Linda Olsson’s Sonata for Miriam. Young women discovering the pleasures and dangers of sex, while mastering a musical instrument? See also The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton. And a determined young New Zealander taking on New York City: that would be Trendy but Casual by Paula Morris, or, back a few decades, Shirley Maddock’s Gently Smiling Jaws.
What makes this curiously zeitgeist-y novel so enjoyable is Laing’s splendid grasp of the specifics. Wellington, London, New York fairly pop off the page. “E, E, E – I heard that letter a lot, and only sometimes in regards to music,” muses Rebecca in London. In New York, Toby works for “a small company phoenixing out of another dot-com burnout”, while Rebecca’s laid-off flatmate hauls discarded furniture off the street to sell via her blog. (One small slip in an other-wise persuasive book: it is unlikely an obscure cello-maker would merit a dedicated museum on the Lower East Side.)
Crucially, Laing is concretely convincing on the minutiae of her characters’ musical lives – the aching arms, the clipped fingernails, the wedding gigs that pay the bills. And then there’s Rebecca’s diabetes: every day of her bohemian young life she is obliged to keep track of her blood sugar and pincushion herself with insulin shots. Laing’s matter-of-fact incorporation of this material lends a surprising and gratifying extra dimension to a novel already brimming with narrative pleasures.
