What is the role of art in an artist’s life? Should you commit everything to honing your talent in the hope of becoming a great master? Or should you use your artistic gift to enrich your life and that of your community? In Partita, acclaimed American novelist Barbara Kingsolver grapples with these questions seriously and passionately through the story of a piano prodigy turned music teacher.
The novel opens in the present, where Livia is a school music teacher in the same part of rural Tennessee where she grew up, married to a farmer who once worked on her father’s farm. Contented middle age has been disturbed by a phone call from Sigurd, a man she had an all-consuming, destructive love affair with at college. This pulls her back into her past: both the period of her brother’s suicide when she was 11, and the years when she escaped on a music scholarship to Indiana, convinced she was leaving her parents’ world behind for good. We discover that her dreams of being a world-class pianist were shattered by an accident that damaged her hand, and that Sigurd played a part in this.
The two timeframes present two visions of the role of music in a life, and two visions of love as well. Livia in the present seems content to be the inspirational local music teacher that she herself had to go much further to find, but it’s clear that the 20-year-old Livia would have considered such a life a failure, and that her faith in her own talent was justified. Livia now is happy with sex as comfort – “like putting a heating pad on an aching muscle”. Yet she still relies on memories of another kind of sex to reach orgasm – sex with Sigurd that she remembers as comprising the tension and release of music: “harmonic tension, dynamic tension, oh my dear lord, the rubato, his movements slowing, slowing, robbing me of the truth of the beat until I begged for justice … Sometimes we both shed tears.”
It’s unfair to quote sex writing out of context, and I feel bad doing it here, but this breathless, overwrought prose runs through the account of Livia’s affair with Sigurd, threatening to throw the whole novel off-kilter. We know from Kingsolver’s other novels how assured her writing usually is, so the gaucheness felt out of place. But Kingsolver commits to her protagonists’ language more fervently than most novelists and I ended up deciding that this must be what’s happening here. There’s no doubt in Demon Copperhead that the brash vernacular is Demon’s own, because the voice is closer to speech than to writing. Here, Livia’s voice is more literary, and so harder to distinguish from Kingsolver’s. But sentences such as “this wasn’t proper by a long shot: fingers craving to know the sandpaper of his jaw” are surely Livia’s, and the florid prose is a sign that she’s carried away by memories of the erotic apex of her life.
Indeed, it’s revealing that Livia’s voice is subtler when it comes to music, which has seen her through into middle age while lust’s flame has faded. Kingsolver – who herself went to college with a music scholarship to study classical piano – is clearly fascinated by music, and how to write about it, and her gifts seem to entwine with Livia’s in the descriptions of piano pieces. Injured and learning to play again, Livia tries Chopin’s B minor Prelude, slowly and tentatively, and finds her own sadness reflected and transformed. “The sadness is all in the melody line the left hand keeps bringing up from below, a slow arpeggio trying to climb up out of the dark, but after a few notes of rising, it falls back down … It’s the God’s honest truth of grief. It doesn’t resolve.”
Livia’s discovery here is huge; she’s coming to understand that a piece of music can enrich the performer and her audience even when the performance might be judged second-rate. Kingsolver is a committed social novelist – she’s even set up a prize to honour the socially engaged novel – and, ultimately, Partita is an impassioned testament to the need for art in ordinary communities, and the need for ordinariness in art. This means, in turn, that these communities have to put aside their own suspicions about artistic elitism, honouring the talents of artists in their midst by sending them away to study if necessary.
Livia says early on that when you have a gift, “it feels like there’s a rule that you have to keep doing it. Not just that you owe it to yourself, you owe it to the world. Maybe to God. As payback on the borrowed gift.” She manages to sustain this vision, even as what it means to “keep doing it” changes for her. Her sister-in-law – herself a gifted scholar of literature, now happy to teach English – helps her to see that “the point of art is to help you like your life better” and that this can mean being a local piano teacher rather than an international soloist. “This was all I needed, back then,” Livia thinks sadly, “Somebody to tell me this.”
Partita doesn’t offer the immediate satisfactions of Demon Copperhead; it’s a quieter book, slower to get going and to make its world enticing. But it’s a rich novel and one that I’ve found has opened up a dialogue with me as a reader that’s continued long after I finished reading it. Kingsolver doesn’t make light of what Livia has lost, and so she’s all the more convincing in her insistence that there’s as much to be gained in the compromises of middle age, and that artists may be following their calling most fully when they find ways to make their art part of a vibrant, loving collective life within our communities.
• Partita by Barbara Kingsolver is published by Faber (£20). To order a copy for £18 go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
