Trumpet: A Novel [Hardcover]

Jackie Kay (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 16, 1999

Jackie Kay's mesmerizing and powerfully moving first novel is about the extraordinary life and seeming dissolution of a family -- about the boundaries of identity and the essential nature of love.

     At its center is Joss Moody, a celebrated jazz trumpeter who created music that convinced everyone who heard it that they knew the man who made it. But Joss's death has proved them all wrong: Joss Moody lived his life inside a stunning secret. His wife, Millie, had known about it. But their adopted son, Colman, now in his thirties, has just learned of it. With everything he understood about himself and his family thrown into question, Colman forms an uncomfortable alliance with a journalist intent on telling Joss's story her own way. Millie, grieving and besieged by the press, secludes herself in their home in a small Scottish village, sinking into the aching solace of memory.

     Their two brilliantly realized voices -- one revisiting the past for comfort, the other for answers -- are interwoven with the equally evocative voices of Joss's drummer, of the doctor who discovered Joss's secret, of the funeral director who hid it for the last time, of the registrar of death certificates, and of the journalist. Together they reveal the startling and poignant story of Joss and Millie: how a complex, dazzling lie became the foundation for a family, a life, and a rare, unshakable love.

     Starkly beautiful, emotionally charged, and wholly unexpected, Trumpet delves into the most intimate workings of the human heart and mind. It is a bravura performance and a triumphant debut.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"It was our secret. That's all it was. Lots of people have secrets, don't they? The world runs on secrets. What kind of place would the world be without them? Our secret was harmless. It did not hurt anybody."

The secret that Millicent Moody, widow of jazz great Joss Moody, refers to may have been harmless in life, but when Joss dies and the truth is exposed, it ends up affecting more people than she ever imagined. It gives nothing away to reveal right off that Millicent's late husband was, in fact, a woman--something Millie has known all along but that the Moodys' adopted son, Colman, only discovers after his father's death. Titillating as the subject matter initially seems, in Jackie Kay's capable hands Joss's gender-bending becomes almost a side issue in a novel that is, at its heart, concerned with the essential nature of love.

Kay tells her story from many different perspectives--the doctor who signs the death certificate, the mortician who prepares the body, the opportunistic biographer looking to make a buck and a name for herself, the musicians who knew Joss--but it is Millicent and Colman who bear the brunt of both the pain and the responsibility for telling the tale. Millie Moody is a tremendously sympathetic character; her love for Joss is so powerful, so right that the reader never questions the decisions this odd couple made in life. "I didn't feel like I was living a lie," Millie tells us. "I felt like I was living a life." Colman, on the other hand, is more difficult to like. Though it's easy to understand his anger and confusion upon suddenly learning that the man he regarded as his father for 30 years was actually a woman, one also has the sneaking suspicion that he wasn't a particularly lovable guy before the revelation, either. Still, by the end of Trumpet, there's hope for Colman, peace of mind for Millie, and a satisfying rendering of love in all its permutations for the reader. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly

A Scottish poet with a fresh and resonant voice makes her fiction debut with a novel about the life of a famous jazz musician, born female, who masquerades as a man. Like the real-life Billy Tipton, Scottish trumpet player Joss Moody has a wife, Millie, and a domestic life. No one except Millie knows the truth about his sex, which is revealed by the medical examiner only after his death. The issue of sexual identity is only one aspect of Kaye's intense and poetic narrative. Joss is black, and both he and his adopted son, Colman, suffer from pervasive racism in London. Kaye prismatically reflects Joss's life in vignettes from almost a dozen characters, some of them endearingly quirky, but the principal voices are those of Millie and Colman. Angry and bitter about having been deceived by his adoptive parents, Colman is a sour young man, without talent, drive or purpose, and his cooperation with a sleazy reporter who wants to write a tell-all book about Joss grants the narrative its main tension. Rather than sensational revelations, Kaye is interested in motivation and emotion, and her portrait of a distraught Millie is an incandescent study of grief. In conveying the nuances of an unconventional but passionate marriage, Kaye creates her own kind of prose music akin to the bittersweet melodies from Joss's trumpet. Once into the rhythm, however, Kaye cannot abandon its cadences: all the characters speak in the same short, lilting sentences and emphatic fragments, beautiful to the ear but not sufficiently differentiated. In the end, the mysteries of Joss's life remain ambiguous, but his courage in maintaining the sexual charade that allows him entree into the jazz world, and his legacy of love, provide the haunting motif of this richly evocative narrative. 40,000 first printing; author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition edition (February 16, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375405097
• ISBN-13: 978-0375405099
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #876,209 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "We were not living a lie, we were living a life.", January 21, 2000

By 

Kim - See all my reviews

This review is from: Trumpet: A Novel (Hardcover)

No one should be surprised that Jackie Kay is an awarding winning poet. The language of this book will caress and coddle many. The lyricism is amazing as characterized by the spirit of Joss Moody and his wife Millie. Kay fails short in that she is not able to make this work for the other characters. The peripheral characters lack flow and dimension. Jackie Kay has written a gem of book but it seems that she expanded her scope too wide and lost some focus.

The story in itself is not original in that Billy Tipton, a jazz musician from the Midwest lived as a man for over 50 years and married 5 times. If interested try reading Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton by Diane Wood Middlebrook.

In order to really appreciate this book, one must move beyond the carnal and the sensationalism of an interracial-married-trumpet playing transvestite. Once we move on, we come to realize that Joss Moody used the agency of love and music for transcendence. For Joss Moody this transcendence did not place him outside of reality. It enabled him to temporally amass the past, present and future as a tribute to his father, his gender, the love for his wife and son, and as a spiritual survivor of the Diaspora.

The story of Joss and his family is a phenomenal microcosm of life and love and TRUTH. Yes, truth. There was no deception on the part of Joss and Millie. The truth is Joss lived many lives as we all do. The deception is in one's own perception of who we are at any given moment. I look forward to reading more from Ms. Kay. She has a nascent talent that I am sure will place her among the great literary writers in time to come.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't have the right words to describe this good book!!, December 8, 2002

By 

Vivek Tejuja "vivekian" (mumbai, maharashtra, india) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Trumpet: A Novel (Paperback)

Once in a lifetime there comes a book/s that make/s u think..they make u feel something...pose so many questions only to show that still waters run deep and Trumpet by Jackie Kay is one such book...

I picked this book with great trepidation knowing whether or not I would like it. But as the case goes and I am glad that all my apprehensions were gone with the wind once I began this tiny jewel.

Trumpet begins on death. Joss moody the famous trumpet player has passed on leaving a legacy of great music and a terrible secret: He was a woman.

This is the crux of the book: Was this deception right or wrong? Narrated through the voices of his wife Minnie Moody ( who knew it all from the very beginning and accepted him as the way he was), their adopted son Joss Moody - who is angry at his father, the band members, his friends, and of course the media hungry journalist Sophie Stones who wishes to write a book on his life.

What struck me most about this book was: Here is a woman born in the thities..wishes to become a trumpet player in the 50's - when most women were not allowed to enter men professions', here was a woman to break and bend all rules....

Absolutely amazing!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pure poetry, June 21, 2003

By 

Elizabeth B. Daykin "eabone" (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Trumpet: A Novel (Paperback)

It was not a surprise to me to read, after finishing the book, that the author is a poet. This book moved with beautiful flow, so easy to read, and engaging. As another reviewer mentioned, the book is based, loosely, on the story of Billy Tipton. "Suits Me" is interesting, but it is an incredibly slow and arduous read and, in return, does not provide much insight into Billy Tipton and his journey. However, "Trumpet" does provide insight and the reader can't help but understand all the of the characters, their struggles and their joys. This is an amazing story and beautifully written.