From Publishers Weekly
The balancing act between art and ambition has been an enduring literary theme since Balzac's Lucien de Rubempre lost his virtue in 19th-century Paris. In Burgin's novel, Ray Stoneson is a composer who compromises his heart in the rarefied air of Tanglewood's and New York City's classical music coteries. Ambitious Ray is 32 and gifted, but his career could use a boost. He's also desperate to win back and marry his ex-girlfriend, singer Joy Davis, who dumped him because of his infidelities. When Ray meets world-renowned conductor-composer Perry Green (clearly modeled on Leonard Bernstein), he quickly spots a way to advance his career. Perry invites Ray to spend a weekend at his house in Interlaken, conveniently located near both Tanglewood and Joy's summer cottage. He professes to find Ray's compositions "interesting," but clearly indicates that he wants sex in exchange for helping Ray's career. Although Ray is worried that Perry's live-in partner, young actor Bobby Martin, will feel threatened by Perry's new interest, Perry waves away his concern, claiming that Bobby is compliant. Ray gingerly slides into secret sex with Perry, who, as promised, starts promoting Ray's music. Tension mounts when Ray and Joy finally reconnect, since Joy is clueless about Ray's double life. Meanwhile, Perry's geniality masks a fundamental egotism that blinds him to Bobby's feelings. Finally, a vengeful and self-destructive Bobby goes berserk. Burgin's plot would make a good opera, Cos? fan tutte with a Faustian twist. His matter-of-fact prose captures the muted struggle and achromatic inner life of a man too hungry for success and na?ve about the costs. Burgin (Fear of Blue Skies) knows all the major players and the buzz words of the contemporary music field, and he is adept at designing the crisp, evocative stage on which his well-defined but strangely distant, glib characters make their motives crystal clear. Agent, Giles Anderson. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Burgin, author of three well-received story collections (Fear of Blue Skies, 1997, etc.), hits several sour notes in a tedious novel that exhaustively analyzes the emotions of a young classical composer who trades sex for career advancement. Ray Stoneson's passive homosexual relationship with his idol and eventual mentor, celebrated triple-threat man in musici.e., composer-conductor-solo pianistPerry Green (30 years his senior, and a dead fictional ringer for Leonard Bernstein) has developed, as Ray realizes, because of his own ``fear of being an ordinary person. Indeed, thanks to Perry's considerable influence, the younger man's work quickly receives highly visible public performance and possibly lucrative recording contracts. But the combination of Ray's troubled conscience, the loss of his girlfriend Joy (ostensibly a gifted singer, but a completely unconvincing character), and the objections of Perry's other current lover, an unstable young actor named Bobby, signal the end of the guilty affair, leaving Ray to his own devices and his own company. This is glum stuff: soap opera without that genre's trashy energy, redeemed only in part by Burgin's obviously thorough knowledge of the worlds of classical music and performance (the story is set mainly in New York City and the environs of Tanglewood in Massachusettss Berkshires). And the mood isnt exactly lightened by numerous lengthy conversations in which characters essentially provide exposition by describing one another in fulsomely flattering terms, or worry ad nauseam about contracting AIDS, either before or instead of having sex. Misconceived from start to finish: an embarrassment. Read Burgins short stories instead. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
