American Music Book

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.