An Equal Music

Vikram Seth

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Let’s break the land-speed record for summarizing this plot: Michael Holme is the second violinist of a fine but under-famous quartet. He’s teaching and sleeping with a hot young Frenchwoman but still carries a torch for the passionate love of his schooldays, who he for some reason broke off all contact with sans explanation for two months; he was never able to contact her thereafter. Now she shows up in his life again, married and with a kid but still carrying the same torch. They embark on one of those extramarital dealies. He is kind of an asshole about it, basically doing everything but explicitly demanding that she leave her family for him and refusing to be the mature one and give it up already. He also ditches the Frenchwoman.

Bach’s Kunst der Fuge and Beethoven’s third piano trio play major starring roles, as does Schubert’s “Trout” quintet, which no matter how much Seth tries to convince me otherwise I still find over-garrulous as a piece. I kept wanting to smack the crap out of Michael, even as Seth made it completely understandable why he was doing what he was doing. Seth has prose to burn, and sometimes burns too much of it to keep his own momentum going. There is something deeply unsatisfying about the refusal of the ending to acknowledge how sad the whole situation is – it’s acknowledged in the pages leading up to the ending, but the actual finale of the book tries to waft away everyone’s feelings on the Kunst der Fuge, and one thing you can say definitively about that music is that it is unbelievably strange and sad. This is one of those books that, if it were a little better, I’d be recommending to everyone I know; but it’s not, and I’m not.

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