Book: Body and Soul
Author: Frank Conroy
Published: 1993 (Dell)
Pages: 447
So this poor kid finds out he has a knack and a patience
(and you totally have to have both) for the piano when he’s young and living
with his mom in this run-down old NYC tenant while she’s driving cabs when she
can, which isn’t nearly enough, and one day the kid goes into a music store and
plays around on one of their pianos and the owner hears him and thus starts a
lifelong journey of increasing musical tutelage, patronage, and working
privilege.
Great, right, except there’s no real arc to it. All of this
slides up smoothly, like a really good glissando, with barely a nod at any
obstacles in his way. He doesn’t really have to fight anything or anybody to
get where he wants to go; he’s good at playing the piano and that helps him
meet the right people and that gets him where he wants to be. The end.
As a kid, he’s a mixture of awe, street-smarts, and natural
tenderness that I was rooting for him to succeed, but when he did so easily and
so early, he flattened out into a generic dude with a sentimental streak that
he never really grew into. I’m sure his symphonies were great and all, but I
can’t imagine where he pulled the conflict he needed to make them truly
interesting.
I did like the mother – she’s a “solid” (read = large) woman
who doesn’t know who fathered her kid during WWII but knows that won’t make a
lick of difference now so she’s getting by as best as she can; she likes Pabst
by the quart and doesn’t show a lot of affection but fully supports her son
anyway without the frills of maternal sentimentality. She also gets called
before the Senate to testify because she’s an unapologetic Commie who doesn’t
tell on her associates, and all she gets for that loyalty is her hack license
pulled.
I also loved the music theory bits. Conroy pulls no punches.
You will learn about the physics of 12-tones, dammit, and if you have no idea
what that is, then too bad. You might get lost when the piano shit gets
serious. Listen, I had a combined total of like 12 years’ worth of music theory
and it took this novel plus a further pub dinner explanation for me to
understand the gist (when some notes are played at the same time, the frequency
of their sound waves match up in sometimes weird ways that intensify or
diminish each other! ISN’T THAT COOL?).
I picked up this book because of David Foster Wallace, whom
I’ve given up resisted pretending to not love. (I might’ve gone as him to a
Dead Celebrities karaoke night and performed that B*Witched song [I can’t spell
in French] with a friend who dressed like Tesla. Together we were The
Ambiguously Famous Duo and replicated the Irish jig bit of that music video on
stage. In front of people. That we know. And like. Life has gotten weird,
y’all.) In “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” his essay about going
on a cruise, he says that Frank Conroy’s Stop Time made him want to become a
writer. (Of course, this was brought up because Conroy had written the souvenir
pamphlet for the cruise ship…)
Maybe I should try that out, and maybe that’s just as
awesome as it still seems like it would be to get DFW to write, but this one
doesn’t really impress. Donate.
…or should I ignore my superstition that if I take my books
to sell at Second and Charles, the Book Dispensary will spontaneously combust
of my guilt the next time I skulk in for my volunteer hours? I might become a bookstore credit junkie. Who
works in a library. I will drown in books one day, and it will be such a
beautiful well-read death.
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