In Barbara Kingsolver's bittersweet 10th novel, Partita, a piano teacher revisits a tumultuous period in her life after an old flame makes contact.
Livia Cable looks back from midlife at the multiple misfortunes that seemed to blight her life and recognizes the enduring power of music and the siren call of unhealthy family patterns. One day, she hears from her ex, Sigurd. He's been receiving treatment in Nashville and asks to meet, regretful at how they left things decades ago. Livia is content with her husband, Charlie, and their dog on their Tennessee farm, but as she clears her late mother's house and plunges into memories of her torrid affair with Sigurd in the week before his visit, her composure wobbles.
Past and present alternate in sections titled after musical terminology ("Overture," "Prelude I," etc.). A partita is a multipart composition featuring different tempos and moods--a perfect metaphor for life's phases. When Livia met Sigurd, a left-wing community organizer, in spring 1989, she was a music scholarship student at Indiana University in Bloomington--a fish out of water from rural Tennessee, a virtuoso with perfect pitch. With Sigurd she experienced instant, addictive physical passion. She promptly dumped her fiancé, moved in with Sigurd, and feverishly practiced Maurice Ravel's near-impossible Gaspard de la Nuit. In banter-filled debates with Sigurd, she defended her father's small dairy farm but conceded that her unionized factory-worker uncles had it better. She assumed hard work always reaps success, whereas Sigurd helped her see that privilege confers lifelong advantage. When Sigurd is unexpectedly transferred to Phoenix, Livia is forced to choose between love and music. Soon after his departure, though, a career-ending accident made the decision for her--and ruled out motherhood, too.
How to carry on with dashed hopes? Livia is a chastened heroine in the classical vein--Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy--but Kingsolver (Demon Copperhead; Unsheltered; Flight Behavior) is equally interested in foundational wounds such as a cold mother (herself nursing thwarted musical ambitions) and the loss of a brother to suicide. As usual, politics crop up: here, abortion and socialism. The novel lacks momentum compared to Prodigal Summer--with her Appalachian background and wry, folksy voice, Livia resembles its protagonist, Deanna, as well as Kingsolver--and has a few anachronistic pop-culture references. Still, patient readers will welcome an elegant, mature work reminiscent of Ann Patchett's. And the ending? Perfection. Partita reassures with its promise of second chances. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck
Shelf Talker: Barbara Kingsolver's down-to-earth 10th novel considers class, fate, politics, and generational trauma through the story of a pianist's shattered career.