Overture

by Yael Goldstein

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A beautifully written, strikingly accomplished debut novel about love, music, and the complex relationship between mothers and daughters —at once a captivating glimpse into lives lived passionately and a subtle exploration of the nature of genius, it is the perfect book for fans of Bel Canto and Amy and Isabelle.

Natasha Darsky is "the most famous violinist since Paganini." Bow in hand, she lights an erotic fire under every piece of music she plays, telling each composer’s story in a singularly sensuous way. The daughter of a world-renowned art dealer in New York City, Natasha grows up in a world where artistic achievement is accorded the highest value, and her father’s opinion determines the rise and the fall of many an artist. Her prodigious musical talent, discovered when she is a little girl, blossoms at Harvard, where she begins to pursue composition as well as performing. She is soon involved in a passionate love affair with Jean Paul, a young composer whose innovative music is hailed as revolutionary. Under Jean Paul's shadow, Natasha abandons her dream of writing music of her own and turns toward performance. Channeling the frustration and muted fury of this choice into her playing, she creates a sexually charged sound that packs concert halls around the world year after year. Her young daughter, Alex, follows in her celebrated footsteps, but it is Alex’s talent as a composer that brings mother and daughter together—and tears them apart in ways Natasha could hardly have anticipated.

Overture draws readers into the glamorous and competitive world of classical music, capturing its harsh demands and its magical power to move performers and audiences alike. With a mastery rare in a first-time novelist, Yael Goldstein offers a fascinating meditation on the nature of creative brilliance and on the love that binds a mother and daughter even when their personal desires clash.

Release date: December 10, 2008

Publisher: Doubleday

Print pages: 304

Sample

I


I AM SITTING IN MY LIVING ROOM, AND THE REPORTER is eyeing me nervously, tapping his foot out of sync with the salsa beat drifting down the stairs. He looks as though he’s raced here straight from the offices of a high–school newspaper, Adam’s apple jumping in his delicate neck, large blue eyes set wide with earnest curiosity in a smooth egg–white oval of a face, though I understand (he’s brought me a collection of clippings as proof) that he’s more established than he looks: recent arts editor of the Yale Daily News, minor freelancing assignments everywhere from The Village Voice to People since he graduated from college last June. His specialty is arts profiles, as he let me know the moment I opened the front door, pushing into my hands the two quarter–page jobs he’s done for Entertainment Weekly; I didn’t tell him that the names in these articles mean nothing to me. We share some tenuous connection, this boy and I, and I am eager to put him at ease: he is the son of the cousin of the brother of God knows who, a line that eventually traces back to my college mentor, Robert Masterson, which is the only reason the kid is sitting here, experiencing what he has now called several times “the most awesome day” of his career.

For half an hour now, he’s been lobbing the usual questions at me, and I’ve been trying to answer as generously as I can. But it’s exhausting to be both truthful and interesting, and I am ready for this interview to end. Unfortunately, I can tell he’s got one last question he’s been holding back, one that he thinks is going to make his interview, of all the dozens of interviews I’ve done this year, of all the thousands I’ve done in my life, stand out. I know this question is going to be dopey–the supposedly trenchant ones almost always are–and I’m feeling antsy and embarrassed for him. But I feel even worse when, after a long pause, he says in an overly loud voice: “Would you say there’s been any single aspect to your life”–he’s biting his pencil between words–“an aspect, or an event, or a…well, the aspect that’s the pivotal one? The one that, you know, made you what you are, the most famous violinist since Paganini?”

“I’d hardly compare myself to Niccolò Paganini,” I say, both because it’s true and because the question annoys me. It’s not the presumption that there’d be an answer to such a question–this I tack up to callow journalism–but the tone of his voice as he poses it. I hear a burrowing, wheedling edge there, and it makes me think, just for a moment, that I’ve been reading this boy all wrong.

“Oh, but haven’t people been making that comparison for decades? Since Vienna, in fact?” he stammers, pushing the blunt–cut bangs off his forehead. When he returns his hand to his lap, I can see beads of sweat have appeared on his wrists, of all places.

“No, not since Vienna. Certainly not that early,” I relent, feeling a new protective swell at the sight of the bony wrists.

“So what was, you know, what would you say it is, the pivotal thing, if there is one? Would you say there is one?”

I look at the beads of sweat, the leg tapping now on the downbeats, the floppy bangs fallen back into eyes glued onto mine, and grab the clearest thought flitting by in the midst of the assorted mental debris. “My love affairs,” I say.

“Your love affairs,” he repeats. His eyes have gravitated away from mine, and I can’t catch his gaze. I’d tried to throw him a line, and now he’s floundering, and so am I.

But we’re saved by a voice booming down the staircase, mingling with the salsa music. “That’s a weird thing to say,” the voice–like a bell trying hard to sound grumpy–calls. “It’s so weird that if I didn’t know better I’d say you were actually being honest. That’d be wild.”

“Is that Alexandra?” the reporter asks, swinging his head around in a motion that makes me think of a child catching sight of the toy he’s about to demand on display in a shop window.

“Yes, that’s Alex, that’s my daughter,” I say, and just then she slouches to the bottom of the stairs.

“I didn’t know she was here,” the reporter exclaims, looking back and forth between us. “Could we possibly? Would it be possible to speak to her as well? I’m such a big fan. Of both of you. Your early recordings together are some of my favorites. I even saw you perform the Van Rheede duet in Brussels when I was a kid.”

Some probing investigative mind you have, I think. It didn’t occur to you to wonder about the source of the salsa music? But because Alex is looking at me with narrowed eyes, I’m quick to say, “I don’t think so. We don’t have much time. I have a lunch date, as I mentioned earlier?”

“Just a few more questions to you, then.” His voice is petulant, aggressive, but as far as I’m concerned, he isn’t here anymore. All my attention is turned to Alex, to her narrowed eyes and what they might mean.

“I wanted to ask about Jean Paul Boumedienne,” I hear the reporter say, as I mentally tick through the possibilities of what might be on Alex’s mind. I stop ticking at the sound of the name, surprised but not yet stunned. The words “Jean Paul Boumedienne,” spoken in the reporter’s high–pitched voice, echo in the room with us, and at first I have the strange suspicion he didn’t say them. I imagined it, I think. It’s an aural conjuring trick caused by too many sleepless nights. I’ve barely slept, it’s true, in the weeks since Alex showed up unexplained and furious at my doorstep. But out of habit, I turn to look at my daughter, expecting the same narrowed eyes that tell me nothing; it’s when I see her narrowed eyes gone hot and white and ghastly that I know.

“Your relationship with him,” the reporter is pressing, and his face, staring intently at Alex, not at me, no longer strikes me as young. “Do you think, perhaps, that that could be the singular thing that made you who you are?”

I want to say, “Where did you learn to link that name with mine?”

I want to say, “What makes you think you have the right to know?”

Most of all, I want to scream, “Alex, why do you look at me like that?” but the reporter is already answering the less urgent of these questions, saying, “It was Robert Masterson who suggested I ask. He told me that Boumedienne was how it all began.”

I watch him long enough to see his thin lips form the words, then whip my head back around just in time to catch sight of Alex’s left foot as it follows the rest of her swiftly out the door.


II


ASK HIM IF HE WANTS COFFEE, I THINK. ASK HIM IF HE wants water. Hold him at bay and hold him in
the dark.

The reporter is sitting ramrod–straight several feet from me, and I can tell, without looking at him, that he’s dissecting the scene in his memory: did something just take place or didn't it? I’d like to think I’m not sure myself, but I am. Something has taken place. I just don't know what. This, in itself, is no surprise; it’s been a long string of I–don’t–know–whats with Alex.

I try to form the words I should say next, that perfect something to deflate the last two minutes, to get him out of my home. I breathe deeply and close my eyes, but what I see is Jean Paul’s face: heavy–lidded blue–black eyes, pale lips curled subtly in unexpected places. So darkly beautiful. So unwelcome. Open your eyes, I demand, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to see the reporter’s boyish face aged with anticipation, or the bland and beige room around us, a room so tasteful it’s clearly not the product of any real person’s taste. I don’t want to swing my feet off the plush white carpeting and tuck them beneath me in a feint of intimacy, to hide that the answer I’m about to offer answers nothing. I have the strange thought that what I really want is to fling my eyes open onto my parents’ West Village brownstone circa nineteen sixty–something. I want to see the narrow staircase crammed with books, the dozens of paintings jostling for space on the walls; when I look toward the dining room, I want to see reds and blues and golds rain down onto my hands from the stained–glass windows above.

I should see all that, because that’s where I am. The reporter is feet away from me, rigid and waiting on the Eames chair upholstered in blandest cream, but I am decades away, under a shower of color, tracing lines across paper. It’s a shame the reporter can't be here with me, because this is probably the closest I can come to answering his question; this is how it all began: sitting at a dining–room table rescued from the original Queen Mary, my five–year–old fingers alive with vibrant shades, but not with talent. What’s really alive is the living room below, shaking beneath my seat, the wood groaning and the glass tinkling its displeasure at one of my father’s foot–stomping tirades. Light swells of jazz mingle beneath this, and supporting it all is my father’s ecstatically violent voice. My mother is hovering around me, her flower–scented arms close, her ghostly pale hand reaching down every now and then, but too lightly, almost afraid to touch the paper I’m carefully filling with lines and curves, though there are canvases of hers littered throughout the house. I hear a door slam, and a small man scurries past the bottom of the stairs, in and out of my peripheral vision in an instant. My father is in the dining room seconds later. He stares for a moment as if trying to place us, and then he says, with marked relish, “I don't think we're representing Milton anymore,” before gliding away on his elegant rage. I am trying to capture all of this in my drawing, but I am finding it infuriating, because I have no idea how one captures anything in a drawing, I am not good at drawing, and what I really want is to make something that sounds like everything I’ve just heard. I turn to my mother and ask how to work sound into a picture. The next week, they start me on violin lessons.

This memory is before me and gone in the time it takes to breathe, once, deeply, in and out. Open your eyes, I think again, but I allow myself one more beat of close–lidded silence, because the one memory has unleashed another, and now I am six years old, and up way past my bedtime, afloat in a murky world of cigarette smoke and clinking glasses that has materialized in our living room. Large, well–dressed bodies cram the space, and either push past me or, worse, stop to ask me questions and then laugh at my perfectly reasonable answers. I long to be away and also dread the moment when I’ll be banished to bed, and so I stick close to my father, who I know has only the vaguest sense of my presence. I watch from behind his left leg as he gleefully holds forth about “simplicity on canvas,” “honest art,” and “finally, finally bringing the sublime into this shit hole of a world” to a group of people who worship him for making them rich. My father has an enormous talent for damning people and movements, and even I know that the fad he’s calling “sublime” tonight, he’ll be calling “criminally naïve” by next month. He is, after all, that famous Abe Darsky who was declaring Abstract Expressionism dead just months after he’d established a gallery to serve as its epicenter. He is that Abe Darsky who spent his childhood dreaming of becoming an artist, yet never felt the need to try his hand at drawing or painting until he entered an art class as a college freshman at Columbia. After two frustrated days of slow and clumsy sketching, he declared himself unworthy to proceed, and turned himself toward the task of revealing who was worthy. He opened his gallery on his twenty–first birthday–funded by the fortune his own father had made with a revolutionary new flushing mechanism and the sheer suction force of his charm–and was a resounding smash not so much because of the work he included in his first show, as because of the much–touted works he rejected by declaring they’d be much improved if hung with their faces to the wall.

These stories are legend to me; my father himself is still legend to me as I cling to his leg and listen to him rant to his guests. I am the only person who takes him seriously when he declares, as he so often does, “Funny to think, isn’t it, that if my old man hadn't thought up a great new way to flush, American art would still be in the international toilet.” That my father (and my mother, whom my father calls his “business brain”) is responsible for all good art in the country is the easiest thing to believe–all one has to do is listen to the brutal thrum in his voice, so mesmerizing and so frightening. So frightening that, standing right beneath it, feeling the force of its tremor shoot through his body into the left leg I’m clutching, I have a sharp need to know where my mother is standing. My eyes wander the room for the sight of her glittering in the background, filling glasses, flashing smiles, being an incandescent work of art herself, the perfect hostess, but also wondering behind that docile face whether her husband has to go on to quite this extent, because surely he couldn’t really think that Michelangelo and da Vinci were pale harbingers of de Kooning. (This I know because she says it later, while tucking me in that night, in that light, delicious way she has of saying impossibly unknowable things as if I know them.)

My eyes are well trained to spot any inch of her from any distance, and so it’s just an instant before I know she’s not here. I make my way through a mess of legs toward the hallway, and up the stairs, climbing toward the slant–roofed fifth–floor room that will soon be my bedroom but right now is still her studio. That I know to go there is strange, because I cannot remember the last time she used that space. But I know and I go, and I find her staring at an empty canvas with her hands limp at her sides, five long, bejeweled fingers clutching a paintbrush dipped deep crimson. “It’s the lighting, I think,” she says without turning around. I see her in profile. “The lighting in this room is impossible.” The clamor from downstairs is rattling the tubes of paint on the ground, and after a moment she says, “Or maybe the noise.” She turns around then, and her face takes on the look that precedes a command, so I brace for her to shoo me to bed, but instead she says, “Go practice the violin, will you?” I think this is the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long while, a brilliant joke, though I don’t quite get it, and we share a strangely wild laugh together before we descend back into the party, to find my father frantically searching for her because someone is asking about last quarter’s profits.