Doctor and the Diva

Adrienne McDonnell's debut novel, which appeared just a few months ago, tells the engrossing story of a woman conflicted by too many loves, loves which lead to complexities and moral dilemmas encompassing an ever larger web of people on three continents. To be more specific, it is the story of the talented singer Erika Myrick, a product of and married into the highest ranks of Back Bay-Beacon Hill Boston society at the beginning of the 20th century. Her talents are operatic, and from the time of her public debut in the spanking new museum designed by Elizabeth Steward Gardner to her decision to go to Florence to realize these talents, we see the talent entwined with competing desires--of her and her husband to have a child, of her gynecologist to help her conceive, of her love and infatuation for that same gynecologist, of the gynecologist's ever murkier relationships with some of his patients, and of the enormous pressure that the Boston establishment can bring on those in their midst who violate principles of upper-class decency and propriety. Adrienne (and I use her first name for a reason) deftly weaves an intricate story of these competing loves, pausing long enough to introduce us to useful and engaging pieces of knowledge--whether of butterflies, gynecological techniques in the 19th-early 20th century, Italian opera of the 18th and 19th centuries, the flora and fauna of Trinidad, or the rigors of trying to break into the Italian opera scene. All the while, she also manages to keep a taut story line so that one never is in doubt about who is doing what at what time or the nature of the conflicts enveloping the minds of two of the leading characters: Erika and her gynecologist, Dr. Ravell.

There really was no good reason for me to have picked up the book, other than that I re-connected with Adrienne at our recent high school reunion and was made aware of it. I quickly rushed down to Kepler's in Menlo Park, where she had a reading early in August, bought my copy, had her inscribe it for me, and then, as is often the case with authors I know, I, as it were "heard" (and "hear") her voice on every page of the book.

The Novelist's Tool Kit

Almost all other reviewers of this book (and most of them give a definite 'thumbs up') tell enough of the story line to whet interest but really don't go into the mechanics of the writing trade deeply enough to tell us why the narrative sings or the characters shine. In the rest of these two essays I will point to three features of her style that I think are not only Adrienne's "signature" but should be her focus as she continues her writing.

A General Observation

But first a general point. Adienne's novel succeeds for me, beyond the story line and the professional and personal ethical dilemmas it probes, because you can tell that each paragraph she writes is a product of care and love. Annie Dillard has said regarding all the good writers she knows, the average "fast-working" author crafts about two or three useful paragraphs a day. Until you carefully study Adrienne's method, you might think that Dillard is being too kind to authors, or sort of being a "rep" for the "writers union" by setting up "low expectations" for them so that we don't get disappointed if all the do is produce one book every six or seven years.

Adrienne's paragraphs are shorter than most authors, but almost each one bears the obvious stamp of an author wrestling with sometimes unkempt and unforgiving English language to get it to yield its secrets to us. Take the paragraph on p. 109, where she describes Erika's frenzy at piano playing to try to escape her grief and pain at the loss of her baby in childbirth (oops, I am giving it away!):

"She sat at the piano and sang Schubert's 'Erlkoenig' over and over, like a madwoman, her fingers galloping over the keys like a horse scrambling at night through a storm."

Good in many ways. First, we are intrigued by her reference to Schubert, and so I went and listened to the frenzied movement of 'Erlkoenig," played by none other than the redoubtable Evgeny Kissin, over and over. Why just breeze over the reference? Is it so important immediately to get to p. 110? Now that I am watching Kissin's fingers darting and flowing over the keys like a cascading waterfall, I understand Adrienne's reference to Erika's fingers "galloping over the keys" at a pace that only the speeding horse knows.

But there is more. "Erlkoenig" was a poem written by the German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for a 1782 ballad opera, but its text was used by Schubert in his Opus 1 (D. 328). It tells the story of a son riding on horseback at night with his father. As they speed along, the son is assaulted by fears and threatening images, which his father tries to explain away by naturalistic explanations. The child screams that he has been attacked. The father, upon reaching home, realizes that his son has told the truth; his son is dead. When Schubert took up the poem and set it to music, he had the music end before the last line of the poem: "In seinem Armen das Kind war tot" (In his arms, the child was dead).

The careful reader catches the intensity of Erika's passion in the music, and Adrienne has dropped a hint to us about how to read and enter into the soul of the character.

"She played and sang until her vocal cords grew sore and her shoulders collapsed."

We collapse with her. Our collapse, however, is not the exhaustion of an athlete who has given his all to help his team win, not the exhaustion of a person who has labored all day and has the exhilaration that comes with knowing that she has put her heart into something of great value. Erika's collapse is the emptying or draining of the self, the pouring of the heart into something that keeps draining every ounce of her strength, leaving her wan, debilitated, weak. Yet, even in the weakness is a glimmer of life, for the next paragraph muses on how the "Lord was a Great Artist," and how He, as it were, gives the "worst and most painful thing" that ends up also being a gift.

This is good writing, even very good writing. And in its scant two paragraphs it has the germs of how Adrienne can become even a better writer, for the paragraphs invite further reflection on the levels of emotion in the playing, of the meaning of some of the individual lines of the poem, of the way that the apparently forbidding Providence of God can become, through the influence of the divine Interpreter, a harbinger of life in the midst of death.

[Next]

4303