Simon Silber: Works for Solo Piano [Hardcover]

Christopher Miller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2002

Simon Silber has a huge ego, a pushy father, a house full of pianos, a closet full of tuxedos—in short, all the trappings of musical genius except genius itself. He seeks inspiration by walking around town with his eyes shut, or by transcribing the pattern of crows perched on his backyard power lines. His singular contributions to modern music—an hourlong performance of the “Minute Waltz,” an etude composed on a telephone keypad, a “chord-a-day” diary, among many others—may not please the ear, but they delight the fancy. As recounted by his biographer-cum-friend-cum-enemy, Norm Fayrewether, Silber’s life story becomes the tragicomic personification of thwarted potential. Norm, himself a frustrated artist (if writing aphorisms can be called an art), mingles biography with autobiography, treating us to an uproarious exploration of the nether realm between brilliance and the desire for it. Norm’s fraught relationship with Silber also sheds piercing light on the volatile bonds between artist and subject, mentor and protégé, truth and self-promotion.
Simon Silber evokes classics of unreliable narration from Nabokov’s Pale Fire to Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse, but it charts a path all its own with artful lampoons of the classical music scene, antic turns of phrase, and an infectious reverence for the mundane.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A cranky, curmudgeonly composer is the ostensible protagonist of this hilarious debut novel, a sendup of classical music conventions that begins when the obscure Simon Silber convinces his new biographer, first-person narrator Norman Fayreweather Jr. to elevate Silber's musical status by chronicling his career as if he were already famous. Fayreweather quickly discovers that his subject comes with a veritable armada of artistic personality quirks but, unfortunately, Silber's talent is basically a mirage. First-time novelist Miller plows through a wonderfully silly discography of Silber's output with Silber "composing" works based on transcribed notes from a neighbor's wind chimes, the notation pattern formed by crows perched on power lines and the tones generated by a Touch-Tone phone. The compulsive composer is also obsessed with what kind of musician gets to play his work, having restricted all his writing to the keyboard so that no one can misinterpret such unusual titles as "Sudden Noises from Inanimate Objects," "Digressions" and a work he "steals" from his equally squirrelly biographer called "Aphorisms." The catty give-and-take between biographer and subject offers plenty of over-the-top passages as Miller fires off one classical potshot after another, particularly when he delves into Silber's troubled relationship with his evil twin, Scooter. Miller pulls off the tricky conceit of having the discography double as the narrative line, although the construct gets pretty messy when he enters the chapters describing Silber's decline. There are also some clunkers in the barrage of humor, but given the high hit rate, classical music aficionados will find much to smile about in this diabolical parody-cum-satire. Author tour. (May 15)Forecast: The droll cover is a clever indication of this novel's iconoclastic humor, but it remains to be seen whether its audience will spread beyond the Bach and Beethoven crowd.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* As classical music lovers well know, the notes to multiple-CD sets can rival small-city phone directories in size; it often seems one has bought a book as well as a recording. Miller japes on that phenomenon by giving us the notes without the recording, and that is just the first joke at the expense of avant-garde classical music in this comic novel as thoroughly, unmaliciously wacky as anything since P. G. Wodehouse. Simon Silber, raised in isolation according to the program his wealthy father devised to make him the greatest pianist of his generation, hired Norman Fayrewether Jr. to write his official biography, portraying him in his fallback role as the greatest American composer. Norman, who at 37 has never resolved his own problems with frustrated ambition (stomping away from academic stardom, he was a surly library aide for 15 years; then his mother died, and he was let go because she had secretly funded his salary), obliged but also dug the dirt for a tell-all that, because it was unlikely to find a publisher (after all, who else ever heard of Silber?), devolved into these notes. Each "chapter" ostensibly annotates a Silber opus, and each immediately digresses to chronicle Silber's strangeness, Norman's counterstrangeness, and the further strangenesses of the nebbishes Norman encounters while researching Silber's idiotic life. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 061814336X
• ISBN-13: 978-0618143368
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,712,925 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very funny in-jokes, June 21, 2002

By 

David Scott Goen "dsgoen" (Ballwin, MO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Simon Silber: Works for Solo Piano (Hardcover)

This book contains a plethora of very funny ideas, but is not directed towards a general reading public. Rather, this book will appeal most to two groups of people: those who find modern music of the Cage-kind pretentious and preposterous; and those who are fed up with biographies that seem to be more about the biographer than the subject. And, just maybe, I should add a third category: people [messed] up for life because of the ... theories and thinking of their parents.

While I fit into the above categories, I found myself laughing more at the situations described in this book after I read it. In others words, the situations are very funny, but the writing is flat. I know this "biography" is supposed to be the work of a poor writer, but I think this approach was unintentionally too apropos. Thus, I laugh at what I read, but not particularly while I was reading it. Telling people about this book is almost more fun than reading it.

Silber's father is a sadist who develops a "method" for turning out a great pianist. He tortures not just Silber with this method, but the entire family. Silber's brother is somewhat of a doppelganger of Silber. Silber's hated sister is petty and cruel, but the way she turns out is the most lifelike portrayal of how a real human being would probably react to the torments of growing up with a bunch of self-absorbed loons.

Afflicted with a phobia against all noise, eventually this leads the composer Simon Silber to remove the strings from one of his best pianos and replace them with rubber. He writes a piece for piano pedals. He spends an hour performing Chopin's Minute Waltz. In short, Silber appears to be the bastard son of John Cage.

The story of Silber is told by a hired biographer, Norman Fayrewether Jr. If anything, I'm more annoyed with the literary pretensions of Fayrewether than I am with the musical pretensions of Silber. Silber is a victim of a childhood he couldn't control; Fayrewether is just a bitter failed writer of bad aphorisms.

There are two clear antecedents to this novel: John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces" and Nabakov's "Pale Fire." The loony farce is descendant from Toole, the structure of the novel from Nabakov. "Pale Fire" is a novel told in footnotes to an epic poem. "Simon Silber" is a novel told as liner notes to a CD collection. It's taken a lot of decades for someone to come up with something as inventive as the structure of "Pale Fire", and, this is another plus in the column for "Simon Silber."

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow! What a hilariously, horrifyingly true story..., April 27, 2002

By 

Rene Duguay (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Simon Silber: Works for Solo Piano (Hardcover)

I think the Publishers Weekly reviewer may have missed the point: This isn't just highbrow slapstick - you don't have to know a thing about classical music to enjoy it and, while it's very funny, there are some very serious things being said here about life among what, if the Nature Channel were to do a show about humans, would be called "non-breeding males." What we have here is something simultaneously rolling-on-the-floor hilarious and astringently satirical that every few pages reveals a frightening truth: something in the nature of A Confederacy of Dunces (or, in a lesser degree, the Neon Bible) or, more recently, David Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day - although personally I found Simon Silber much more enjoyable than the latter two.

It has been said that all first novels are autobiographical, and certainly every aspiring novelist must have shared the long years of obscurity and self-doubt that defines the lives of the two main characters in this novel. The endlessly rewritten, never-to-be-published novel has become something of a cliché. We all know someone who's written one, and the longer they go without publishing, the more deeply entrenched they become: endlessly pacing back and forth, manuscript in hands, wearing a rut in the earth that gradually rises above them, until eventually the writer vanishes and only his or her hands, still clutching the text, remain above ground; like Simon Silber, they hope that fame will at least descend upon them posthumously, as it did on John Kennedy Toole. Miller, fortunately, is still alive, which means that we can look forward to much more from him.

Many, many readers who will recognize friends, family members and - scariest of all -- themselves in the various portraits of obsession and compulsion Miller has drawn here. And for every classical music in-joke there are dozens of quotable lines, delivered in Fayreweather's delightfully unreliable voice, that will go over no one's head: "Like most men, [Simon Silber] defaulted to thoughts of naked women any time he wasn't straining to think about something else." Or "I had been thinking of writing my own memoirs... but [was] wondering if it wouldn't be wiser to practice on someone else's life first."

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, a book about Aphorists, June 7, 2002

By 

Douglas Ybarbo (Sugar Land, TX United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Simon Silber: Works for Solo Piano (Hardcover)

This is really a beautiful book. Take the reviews written about Richard Powers (particular Galatea) and apply them to Mr. Miller. The prose is meticulously crafted, but not just that--the subtle (though not too subtle that his non-literary readers didn't pick up on them)changes in voice, as the narrarator's mood oscillates from adulation to envy to spite to disgust to amusement and all back again.

Just really fine, fine writing.