Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones, once famously defined the novel as a “comic epic in prose.” This turns out to be a surprisingly negative definition, when you think about it. A novel is prose, you see, because it’s not poetry. It’s an epic, since it’s not a lyric; novels tell stories rather than set moods. And it’s comic mostly in the sense that it isn’t tragic; the novel as an art-form wants to end with more weddings than funerals.
Each of these elements is routinely violated by books we’d all want to call novels, but what else is there to say about the genre? Fielding’s definition does at least express the fact that when we pick up something labeled a “novel,” we reasonably expect a story of human characters reacting to one another in social situations: meeting and parting, marrying and burying. Indeed, one of the pleasures of reading fiction is its concentration on how “real people” think and act. Readers can don different selves, become voyeurs, experience possible lives, and feel unimagined emotional climaxes — without incurring a punch on the nose, a term in jail, or a new family to support.
Curiously, here in 1999, exactly 250 years after Fielding’s Tom Jones appeared, there seem to be very few among the innumerable authors publishing ostensible novels in English who still remember this minimal requirement for what a novel is supposed to do. But the novelist Vikram Seth is one of those few. His new book, An Equal Music — a tale of no-longer-young musicians trying to rekindle the passion they had known as students — is not quite up to the level of his previous work. But it’s still enough of a genuine novel to offer the novel reader’s greatest pleasure: an opportunity to live for a few hours in another person’s life.
Vikram Seth (rhymes with “gate”) was born in Calcutta in 1952, the son of a shoe company executive and India’s first woman judge. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before coming to America to train as an economist at Stanford. Along the way, in 1982, he attended Nanjing University in China.
This is the sort of background from which dilettantes loom, and Seth has something of the dilettante’s wide range. But he has nothing of the dilettante’s shallowness, and his writing has continuously garnered plaudits. Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet won the Thomas Cook travel book award in 1983. Then came a collection of poems, The Humble Administrator’s Garden, followed by The Golden Gate in 1986. When A Suitable Boy appeared in 1993, it sold over a million copies, even though the book is a 1,349-page novel set in India shortly after independence and centered on a young woman’s difficulties in choosing whom to marry while dealing with the demands of kin, caste, and love.
For the larger audience of readers, The Golden Gate was Seth’s breakthrough volume. Set in San Francisco, the virtually unadvertised book spread by word of mouth among San Franciscans until it too was a best seller. It is a novel made up of sonnets (a comic epic not in prose), born in an encounter with Alexander Pushkin’s 1831 verse-novel Eugene Onegin and employing a fourteen-line stanza of iambic tetrameter lines (rather than the pentameter usual English sonnets). The table of contents in The Golden Gate, for instance, runs:
The world’s discussed while friends are eating.
A cache of billets-doux arrive.
A concert generates a meeting.
A house is warmed. Sheep come alive.
Olives are plucked in prime condition.
A cat reacts to competition.
Arrests occur. A speech is made.
Coffee is drunk, and Scrabble played.
A quarrel is initiated.
Vines rest in early winter light.
The Winking Owl fills up by night.
An old affair is renovated.
Friends meditate on friends who’ve gone.
The months go by; the world goes on.
Seth’s plain style — characteristic of his prose as well — draws the reader directly to manner, mores, and character, with the short line charging the narrative with energy. So energetic is Seth’s style, in fact, that readers turned all 1,349 pages of his second novel, A Suitable Boy, without noticing how long it is.
In A Suitable Boy, Seth follows the example of Fielding, Thackery, and Trollope, turning a mother’s search for a husband for her daughter into a set of interlocking stories. Revolving around four families, three Hindu and one Muslim, and sprawling across India, the novel uses its length to paint an epic depiction of, among other things, the life of Muslim women in purdah, everyday use of the Bhagavada Gita, the deference paid to caste, and the pomposities of new Indian judges, as well as the modernizing of shoe manufacturing and British Literature at a university. A Suitable Boy takes us back to the beginnings of the novel in English, where the panorama of life can be surveyed in the course of getting two young people married.
The musical themes in Seth’s latest, An Equal Music, have appeared in his work before. The sonnet 3.37 from The Golden Gate, for instance, describes a musician’s son reacting to Brahms:
The lights have dimmed. Now they’re returning
Throats clear. Brahms’ A Minor begins.
The brisk allegro. Then a yearning
Warm ductile length of lyric spins
Its lovely glimmering thread at leisure
Inveiglingly from measure to measure
With a continuous tenderness
So deep it smoothes out all distress,
All sorrow; ravishing, beguiling . . .
And on and on till silence comes.
Paul whispers, “That’s the tune Mom hums!”
Phil’s eyes are closed, but Paul is smiling,
Floating on a slow tide of Brahms,
Back in his absent mother’s arms.
So too, in A Suitable Boy, the heroine and an “unsuitable” boy disguise their romance by meeting at classical concerts.
In some ways, An Equal Music is the least interesting of Seth’s works. It is a short book, in prose, employing the most traditional plot possible: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy goes through trials and regains girl — with the appropriate modern ironies. But then, this is the plot of the vast majority of novels, from Tom Jones to Great Expectations to Ulysses, and, in all of them, the plot is merely the vehicle for the novelist’s conception of manners, mores, and character.
An Equal Music is told in the first person by the second violinist in the Maggiore Quartet, who loves an ensemble pianist. From the blurb on its jacket, An Equal Music plays like An Equal Muzak:
When an English quartet undertakes a challenging work of Beethoven’s, violinist Michael Holme is overwhelmed by memories of mastering the piece as a student in Vienna . . . where he met Julia McNicholl, a pianist whose beauty was as mesmerizing as her musical genius, and Michael loved her with an intensity he never found again. Now, years later, a chance encounter reunites them and their passion is reawakened. Although Julia is married and has a child, she agrees to tour Vienna and Venice with Michael’s quartet. But she carries with her a heartbreaking secret: She is gradually going deaf. Together, Michael and Julia must confront the truth about their love for one another and their love for the music that brought them together.
Here the blurb writers have betrayed the author. In an interview, Seth emphasized that he wanted the reader to discover Julia’s deafness along with Michael: “Why lay a trail,” he moaned, “if the book jacket gives it away?”
But Seth eschews sentimentality, and An Equal Music is no corny novelette. There is a more important trail to follow. The real secret is that its lovers love music above all else. And Michael has another love in an increasingly valuable violin he was lent by an old lady from his hometown when he first started serious competition. He cannot bear the probability of surrendering it to her heirs.
The essence of their characters is that Michael and Julia are so competitive as performers, they cannot come together. In the last stages of the novel, the Maggiore Quartet lands a lucrative contract to record Bach’s Art of the Fugue. The pianist Julia too undertakes to perform the Art of the Fugue in concert, because her increasing deafness prevents her from ensemble playing any more (and, the reader guesses, because she wants to compete on Michael’s turf). But when Julia contracts for the concert, Michael gets the string player’s equivalent of stage fright and has to quit his quartet — just as, ten years earlier, he had had to quit Vienna and Julia because his third finger “responded slowly, and was only effective after a long warm-up.” His teacher
reacted with fury and impatience . . . as if one of the potential diamonds on his crown was proving itself to be merely carbon, convertible to its ideal form only under intense and continuous pressure. He applied it, and I crumbled.
When Julia tried to talk Michael into staying in Vienna with his lessons, he found her defense of his teacher “an unbearable’ betrayal on her part.” His inability ten years later to play the Art of the Fugue at the same time as Julia indicates Michael’s continuing narcissism and immaturity. It is with considerable irony that Seth takes his title from John Donne’s description of Heaven: “In that house they shall dwell, where there shall be no cloud nor sun, no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light, no noise nor silence but one equal music, no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession, no foes nor friends, but one equal communion and identity.”
In commenting on his protagonist, Seth describes Michael’s behavior as “dubious.” Indeed, Seth’s view is that many musicians are immature and their “maturity, such as it is, comes out through the interpretation of their music.”
Rather than being a love story, then, An Equal Music is a novel of growing up, a bildungsroman in which the date of maturity has crept up to thirty-seven years old. Michael Holme’s only chance at obtaining “one equal communion” with Julia requires that he accept her as a deaf soloist. Of course, in the end it turns out that his reward is permanent possession not of the girl but of his beloved fiddle. But that’s the kind of thing to be expected of a “comic epic in prose.”
Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University.
