Harper
Review by Walter Cummins
In music, Barbara Kingsolver’s title word, partita, is defined as “a suite of instrumental pieces, typically a series of contrasting variations sharing a single home key.” In Kingsolver’s literary application, the home key is Livia Bohusz’s life from teens to middle age, and the variations are brought to life in sections titled with those used in, say, Bach violin partitas—overture, prelude, allemande, toccata, sarabande, fugue, pathétique, da capo. The prose tone of each section mirrors the title term’s musical pace and feeling. Livia explains, “A partita will never be all happy rondos, or all andantes in a minor key. You’ll usually have a prelude, a thrilling allemande, maybe a slow, sexy sarabande—the contrast is the point.”
Rather than being chronological, the novel’s organization is based on a series of detailed explorations of what happened to Livia during the turning points of her life. The only plot unknown is established early on in Prelude I with Livia’s call from her one-time lover, Sugurd, more than twenty years after their breakup. Will she meet with him and, if so, what will happen? The answers come at the end. All that is revealed before these concluding sections is a form of backstory.
Almost all of Livia’s life situations can be linked to a familiar trope found throughout works of fiction. These include a sibling who died in the childhood, the working class girl who gets a scholarship to study at a university, a romance between partners from different classes, the sudden sexual allure of an attractive stranger, an unwanted pregnancy, mother-daughter alienation, the loss of a childhood dream, and the sudden reentry of a person from the past.
Yet Partita is a fresh and original novel, in part because Kingsolver unites all of these tropes into a meaningful totality, but primarily through the imaginative strength of her writing. Even though so many versions of these situations are familiar from an extensive story tradition, Kingsolver makes them new, as if were the first time they ever found their way into literature. The energy and rhythms of her language embody her originality, its urgency exposing Livia’s emotional interior.
Kingsolver has a special talent for capturing the visceral essence of an experience, such as the sensation of music (“Music is made of tension. Little tense moments, one after another, each one a building block of tightness or unease that makes your body lean toward something, want it, even long for it, until that yearning is answered with release“), the height of sexual pleasure (“His body with mine, attending to mine, created moments of tension and release, over and over, building to resolutions within resolutions”), and the agony of physical pain (“Pain was a constant, even when I’d had the best medicine at my beck and call. Those drugs do a funny thing to your brain, not really removing the shrieking doorbell of pain, just telling you not to answer it”).
This inventiveness begins with the very opening of the novel: “Here’s my question: How does a person step in front of a train and leave everything right there? Inhale, no exhale. / It tilts you on a slant, to walk your whole road with a question like that and no answer to balance it out. Answers are such everyday things to count on, reliable as your teeth. You only notice when one goes missing, leaving its partner to grind on empty air. In life or art or music, it’s the same.” These words introduce the crucial fact of Livia’s brother’s teenage suicide and make that suicide inseparable from all of Livia’s personal trials in the novel to come. So much of what happens to her involves the loss of something as seemingly certain as a tooth, leaving grindings on empty air.
Her losses are sudden and shocking. Most traumatic is Sigurd’s abrupt and unexpected departure to a faraway city on a labor organizing assignment, a goal he chooses over their obvious—to her—love relationship. She refers to its consequences as “her disaster with Sigurd.” When he is gone, her life falls apart with grief, poverty, physical injury, major surgery, and the impossibility of attaining the future she had imagined since early childhood,
Throughout the novel, music is a dominant presence, the force behind Livia’s life, beginning with the pieces she learns rehearsing on a church piano as a child and young teen, then her selection to perform with a major symphony, next the piano suite she struggles with and eventually masters in music school, and finally the joyful variety of works performed by her students in the novel’s last scene. Music returns to fill the profound gap in Livia’s life and resolves her many losses.
