In the real world, memory lapses in music are commonplace. Affected performers usually fudge a few bars until muscle memory clicks in; seasoned conductors will look to help out a struggling soloist. But there is nothing collaborative about music in Levy’s novel, nor does it ever seem to be about communication with a listener. Elsa tells us that it’s the conductor whom her hands “refuse” to play for.
The connection between this soulless concert scene and the wider climate of toxic masculinity is explicit. When men compliment Elsa’s looks, they say things like “You’re a killing machine in a bikini.” In Paris, a tourist at a neighboring table tells her he wants to lick her. A little later, the same man holds aloft the cellphone she left behind in the cafe and teasingly waves it around “as if he were conducting an imaginary orchestra.” When Elsa’s Parisian friend makes him drop it by stomping on his foot, he hurls insults at the two women. “We were queers, we were freaks, we were Jews” — the tourist has to be German, of course — “we were hags, we were ugly, we were mad. The same old composition.”
Elsa’s teenage students, too, have to rattle the bars of their assigned music. The nonbinary Marcus would rather dance an Isadora Duncan impersonation to Schubert than learn the music. This enrages the father, who addresses his child as “little man.” “It seemed,” Elsa muses, “their father had already written his child’s composition.” Aimée, meanwhile, confides to her teacher at their second lesson that she was molested by the family doctor. When Elsa tries to speak to the girl’s mother, it is clear she is interested only in the musical notes her daughter produces, not her words.
As Elsa drifts around Europe and memories bubble up in the silence that has befallen her career, it becomes clear that she needs to come to terms with her tangled lineage before she can write her own score — the new composition that first insinuated its way into her fingers during the concert in Vienna.
Along the way, the book offers glimpses of Levy’s talent as a stylist. She can sketch a scene with a few precise brushstrokes and conjure emotion out of white space on the page. A recurring call and response between Elsa and her alter ego becomes a musical refrain that takes on ever new colors. Those familiar references to swimming and bees glint through like leitmotifs.
For an author so committed to dismantling stereotypes, it is a shame Levy should sketch out her own with such a thick pen. The challenge of authenticity in art of any genre does make a fine subject: Miles Davis once said that “it takes a long time to sound like yourself.”
