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American Music

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I read American Music with very high hopes as I'd been a huge fan of I Was Amelia Earhart and had liked Innocence, and I was hoping that Jane Mendelsohn would rise to that high standard after some years of not publishing. I was really blown away. Her writing is brilliant, poignant, wise, and lyrical. The book is full of mystery, and it plays on various formal devices, but it never takes on the awkwardness of so much postmodern fiction. There is a deep humanity at its center, a kindness both within the characters and surrounding them, a generosity of authorial spirit that is infinitely touching. The plot is engrossing and there is ample wit. It is a structural miracle, as delicate and perfectly arranged and assembled as a snowflake. When you read it, it seems as though you are getting everything in it, but after that, you find yourself thinking and thinking about it, and applying its insight to real life. Mendelsohn's work is often in the form of a perfect miniature, and this has some of that diminutive quality, but it is also a work of substance, and it will change the way you think and feel. I am afraid this will sound like hyperbole, but it is in fact my honest response to a gorgeous work of fiction. I wish I could have that lovely voice of the novel beside me always.

American Music is that rare joy - a book that is totally absorbing, beautifully written and intensely moving. It is a story that stays with you long after its final pages. The writing is heart-stoppingly gorgeous, fiercely imaginative and above all, literary. While it is an intimate experience to read the book, it's emotional scope is wide and deep. The various stories seem so divergent, yet they tie together in the most lovely and unexpected ways. After I finished it, I really felt as if I had been somewhere.

In 2005 twenty-one year old physical therapist Honor works at the Bronx VA hospital. Her current patient is Iraqi veteran Milo, having suffered a spinal column trauma. He is moody and uncooperative, but she goes about her job with professionalism.

However, as she begins to touch parts of his body, the therapist and the patient begin seeing visions of people they never met. There is jazz saxophonist Joe, his wife Pearl and Vivian her cousin. Vivian shares Joe's love of music; while Pearl studies the law and they have an affair. The therapist and the patient meet others from the past like the late 1960s-1970s trio Iris, Alex, and Anna and early seventeenth century in Turkey Parvin, Kaya and Hyacinth. Honor and Milo struggle to connect dots as the visions become clearer with each new revelation.

This is a fascinating well written metaphysical tale in which the diverse deliberately slow paced segues repeat several times with each new rendition adding depth to what Milo and Honor learn about the dance of forbidden love over the ages. Like the lead couple, readers will need to know what is going on in the different pasts and why this pair "see" these vivid dramas at this time.

Harriet Klausner

A dazzling achievement. Wild and wise, and beautifully imagined. Mendelsohn's book is like an elegant merging of music and fiction, its full of great characters, and stories, but it also achieves something more lyrical. The passion is in the language, as much as in the plot. Like Michael Ondaatje, or Gabrial Garcia Marquez, Mendelsohn is both a born poet and a natural storyteller. And in her new novel, she gives us a romantic view of New York City, and American life, unlike any I have ever seen.

In Jane Mendelsohn's beautifully written third novel,"American Music," stories live inside bodies. It is our privilege to discover them through connections that reach across time, through love and real pain, transcending history and culture, in order to reveal a true belief in the power of intimacy and imagination. There is a radiant quality of characters alone, yet irrepressibly connected through a shared drive to live and love. That the story begins with something inexpressible, trauma hidden inside the back of an Iraq War veteran, that this core of silence unleashes passions that bring us into worlds of boundless invention, full of sound and beauty, is a profound surprise. "American Music" proposes an original notion about the relation of the self, separate and finite, and the world, expansive and enduring. In Mendelsohn's hands they are the same, the self and the world, tangled together, making new stories, dance, music, images, stories - stories to read!

American Music is an astonishing, beautifully-realized meditation on the power of stories - their power to bind us, to separate us, and, over time, to create complex personal and cultural histories. When Honor, a young massage therapist, touches Milo, a solider wounded physically and emotionally by the war in Iraq, images of people images flash in their minds like a simultaneously playing movies. Who are these people and why do they appear? This is the mystery that the reader, Honor and Milo unravel together. Mendelsohn's prose is full of startlingly beautiful images and passages of deep wisdom. Yet this book of poetic ideas is most satisfying in the way it pulls you in, keeps you turning the pages, inviting you to participate in the unraveling of a history that includes us all. American Music is a luminous and totally original book you must read.

From the moment Honor, a specialist in therapeutic bodywork, plies her magical touch on Milo, a severely wounded hospitalized Iraq veteran who keeps his useless legs encased in the bloodstained boots that belonged to the soldier who saved his life, we fall captive to Mendelsohn's heady, haunting world in which fantasy intersects with reality but where emotions--love, passion, spite, heartbreak--are as real as the clang of the cymbals, the instrument developed by an Armenian in 17th Century Turkey that helped create the sound of American swing, which reverberates through this brilliant novel. As Honor and Milo together uncover an alarming, mysterious power to unlock the past, we are introduced to characters spanning several decades, even centuries. There's Joe, a law student who supports himself with saxophone gigs during the Depression married to Pearl, a former wardrobe girl on the set of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. Their stable but childless marriage is threatened by the artistic, bohemian Vivian. There's the creative and impulsive Iris incompatibly married to Alex, a stickler doctor court-martialed during the Vietnam War for "whining" about insufficient medical supplies. There's Parvin, a sultan's concubine, in love with a eunuch whose partial maiming is echoed by Milo's impaired condition. There's the confused, volatile Anna, a 17-year-old single mother who reclaims the daughter she had decided to put up for adoption but tlater becomes estranged from her. The threads that link these characters are deftly untangled to tell a highly original and unusual family saga whose themes of love and loss are like a sublime melody you can't get out of your head.

This is a surreal account of a relationship between a masseuse and her client--an injured Iraqi war veteran. With every visit, the woman's touch releases from the man a string of stories. They're love stories told through time travel. They become more and more intertwined creating a suspenseful windup to a big and memorable ending. That's generally my biggest complaint with a lot of high-style fiction. It doesn't deliver a satisfying ending with something meaningful for the reader to chew on. "American Music" delivers. It's original, ingenious, and full of imagination. Jane Mendelsohn gives us escapism via a book that left me rethinking the nature of relationships and chance.

Through the ages, the power of stories has defined and guided and transformed and healed us. On rare occasions, it has even saved lives. In the ancient One Thousand and One Nights, for example, the legendary Persian queen Scheherazade kept herself alive with mesmerizing stories that persuaded the King to spare her.

With a nod toward this beloved tale, Jane Mendelsohn introduces Milo, a severely wounded Iraqi veteran suffering from a spinal cord injury and PTSD and Honor, his young and emotionally crippled physical therapist. When she touches his destroyed back, it unleashes powerful stories within him - a virtual tapestry of images from the past.

For instance, there is the triangle of the married couple Joe and Pearl and her bewitching cousin Vivian in the mid 1930s. As the aspiring jazz musician Joe falls more and more under the sway of Pearl's green-eyed cousin, he finds himself in the untenable position of loving two women in vastly different ways. Their affair takes off on the cusp of the golden age of jazz, when the two attend Count Basie's inaugural concert in New York on Christmas Eve.

There is a woman photographer in the 1960s, whose life's work is shockingly stolen. And then there's the story of a favored concubine and a eunich named Hyacinth in 17th century Turkey, whose forbidden love is captured in music. All these stories are interspersed with Honor's own story - the daughter of an unmarried mother who is searching for both her past and her future.

The one story that is held back from the reader - until much, much later - is the story of Milo himself. It is a story that he is afraid to grasp or explore. Honor muses: "Milo Hatch, a handsome young man, only in this story, the story she was receiving from him, he was not a twenty-four-year-old war veteran struggling or his sanity in the first decade of a new century, he was a young jazz musician in the 1930's who was falling in and out of love. And he was more: he was the boats on the Hudson River at sunset, the blue light of a September dusk, a black car pulling up to a gritty curb at night, a woman with ships in her eyes."

Together, Honor and Milo - both crippled emotionally - seek the answers to their damaged lives through these stories. She says to him, "All I know is that these stories seem to be inside you. And that somehow when I touch you they come out. I you let us keep going maybe we can get some answers. But maybe not." He recognizes the magic as well: "The story could not go on without her. He could not go on without her. And the light moved through her and she was strange to him, and radiant."

These stories appear in pulsating and transcendent detail - colorful, vibrant, ready to snatch onto, ready to burst forth. As the book progresses, Milo and Honor's story becomes more and more part of the fabric of these tales - with love always at the core. Each must decide what stories to believe in and which to discard. Milo reflects that "he had nearly given his life for a story about his country, but he didn't believe in that story anymore. Then he had come home and he had kept on fighting and had fought for another story: Honor's." And Honor? Her stories come alive for her as a way of reconciling with an unknown or misunderstood past.

Is the torrent of memories and alternate lives a mirage and can it indeed save either or both? As this intricate puzzle plays out, we learn the answers. And all the while, the music is in the background "a moment in time that had given rise to that music, a moment and a music that had seemed so isolated from history." Like Count Basie, this book elevates...and swings.

The best way to describe the sublime reading experience of Jane Mendelsohn's luminous American Music (Vintage Contemporaries) without revealing too much of its sensitive and very original story is to say that American Music (Vintage Contemporaries) is an out-of-body experience, one that rides on the rhythm and flow of beautiful music of the love.

What do I mean by that? Well, imagine, if you will, a treatment room in a rehabilitation hospital, with the soulful vibrations of gently rhythmic music accompanying Billie Holiday's soft and sad voice, warming the room, calming the energy. Lying prone under a thin sheet on the massage table is Milo, an Iraq War veteran, suffering with severe bodily injury and PTSD. Milo has surrendered a body, mind and soul greatly damaged by war to the empathetic hands of his body worker, a lovely young woman, a former dancer named Honor.

Honor "looks both present and ancient. She looks like some beautiful soldier arrived from history." Every week she appears at the hospital to lay her skilled, compassionate hands on the body of her wounded soldier, a body which she intuits is suffering something more, something greater than pain, a body "that contains his country's history."

When Honor expertly places her therapeutic hands on her soldier's broken body, using some carefully selected music to calm the disturbances that reverberate from deep within his haunted body, searching carefully for the pain and trauma repressed and buried in his fragile core, touching those sensitive places which will help release some of his suffering...something much, much more happens...the exchange of energies, the liberation of visions, the release of stories.

Honor can touch Milo and read him, as if there is a story imprinted on every muscle, bone, sinew and scar of his suffering body. Through her sensitive hands on his traumatized body, Honor and Milo work as partners, interpreting images captured in music and dancing through stories from the past, visions which appear to both of them. By mutual agreement they continue with this mysterious treatment plan, working their way to a healing...and love.

The stories that Honor and Milo conjure by love I will not reveal in this review. I leave those for you to experience for yourself. They are poignant love stories that send out ripples and stir up waves of music. They are passionate and tragic, romantic and heartrending. They are eloquent and convincing evidence of the healing power of the story.

As a licensed body worker myself, I found a deep resonance in American Music (Vintage Contemporaries). Awakening feelings of such intensity as only few writers are capable of inducing with language, Jane Mendelsohn has composed a prosaic novel overflowing with vibration and music. This novel is so powerfully moving that it makes you pause and catch your breath. It is so visionary that it changes the way you view life and its many hidden complexities. It is so captivating that you will revel in its creativity... and be soothed by the music of love.