PEARL K. BELL
85
piece to show his love for the woman swooning in the background. They
don't make movies like that any more, thank God, but novelists trying to
convey the essence of music through words can sound equally silly.
As
the
genius of
Body and Soul
ruminates at one point, "But don't you think it's
practically impossible to write about music directly?
It
doesn't lend itself
to words." Conroy should have taken these sentiments more seriously.
The trouble begins on the first page, when Conroy writes that
Claude Rawlings "was six years old, and much of his thinking, especially
when he was alone, went on without words, went on beneath the level of
language." One can have wordless images, but there can be no "thinking"
without language, and Conroy's meaning seems muddled from the start.
In any case, the little boy is locked in a squalid basement apartment on
Third Avenue all day while his huge and sullenly unloving mother drives
a taxi. One day Claude discovers an out-of-tune piano in the back room
and eureka, a star is born. From the kindly music-store owner who first
discerns Claude's budding genius, through a succession of astounded
teachers, brilliant recitals, louder and louder acclaim, we follow our hero's
development not only as a magnificent piano virtuoso but as a composer,
a lover, a husband, and so on. There is nothing at which he does not ef–
fortlessly succeed, and at the end of the novel we leave Claude, in his
early thirties, as he is about to dazzle the world with his performance of
the solo part in his own concerto. That is it.
Among the dozens of characters there is scarcely a credible human
being to be found; everyone exists as an appendange to the hero's genius.
In the earlier
Stop- Time,
Conroy endowed a boy's struggle to master the
yo-yo with an emotional vitality that the high-minded hosannas to
Mozart in
Body and Soul
never attain. When Conroy tries to capture what
music means to Claude, the prose turns leaden and hackneyed: "Music is
here!
It
was so much larger than life, so ineluctably strong, so potent an
indicator of a kind of heaven on earth," and so on. Not even the vast
amount of information about the classical piano repertoire that Conroy
sprinkles into his story can prevent such writing from sounding not only
banal but tone-deaf, and badly in need of tuning.
Steven Millhauser, the author of the three inventive stories collected
in
Little Kingdoms,
began his literary career with a hilarious and ingenious
novel titled
Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer,
1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright.
When he wrote the book, Millhauser
was a graduate student in English at Brown, corning up for air from the
loneliness of the long-distance thesis. In this putative homage to a child
literary genius who died at the age of eleven, Millhauser produced a
cunning parody of Literary Biography (Semi-Worshipful) and the dry-as-
