Reviews for American Music

The average rating for American Music based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-08-31 00:00:00 Kelly Neff An American Romance In Stories And Music Jane Mendelsohn's evocative novel "American Music" (2010) is a story of American loves, American dreams and American music, as exemplified by the saxophone, the cymbals, Count Basie, and Billie Holiday. The short book becomes far-flung in time and place, but the primary setting is New York City in 2004-2005 in the midst of the Iraq War. The primary characters are Milo, 25, who has received a severe spinal wound while on military service in Iraq, and Honor, 21, a dancer and a physical therapist. Milo is in a New York City veteran's hospital where his injury is not responding well to treatment. The hospital hires Honor to work with Milo's back once a week. The therapy proceeds for about one year as the two gradually fall in love. The book is recounted from a variety of perspectives and in many different voices, as befitting the yarn-like character of the story. Milo suffers from deep emotional traumatization as well as from spinal injury. At first he resists Honor's therapy. Then, when Honor is massaging and rubbing his back, arms, and hands, Milo begins to tell lengthy, involved stories that get embellished as time goes on. Honor too begins to tell stories, as she and Milo connect emotionally. The primary story that Milo tells involves a young man, Joe, who is studying law while working as a saxophonist in a swing band in the 1930's. For Joe, music is is first love, and he will become a reluctant lawyer. Joe is married to Pearl, a lovely, faithful woman who has suffered several miscarriages. When Joe meets Pearl's educated and artistic distant cousin Vivian, Joe and Vivian begin a romance. The triangle gradually plays itself out as Milo develops his story. Further embellishments carry the tale back to 17th Century Istanbul, where an alchemist is shown to perfect the making of cymbals that will later have a strong place in the development of American swing. Another strand of the tale involves a gifted woman photographer whose photos are mysteriously stolen from her apartment after she has been scheduled for a show at a major New York museum. Still more, Milo tells the story of an Army physician, and his estranged wife. During the Vietnam era, the physician is court-martialed for alleged conduct unbecoming an officer. The strength of the book lies in the lyrical character of Mendelsohn's writing, which often adopts itself in rhythm and language to her varied stories and people. At its best, her writing has a shimmering and musical quality. Mendelsohn develops scenes and characters poignantly and in detail. The weakness of the book lies in its miniaturism. In spite of the author's efforts, the stories to not pull together convincingly, and they do not fully connect to the relationship between Milo and Honor. The stories often take the focus away from these characters. There is a sense of disjointedness when the different stories and flashbacks are introduced, and thee stories and flashbacks don't entirely tie-in with the story of Milo and Honor. The sense of mystery and passion the book often conveys thus in places deteriorates into confusion. The book offers a picture of American romance and hope against backgrounds of loss and tragedy. It emphasizes the power of music to the American heart. Although marred by diffuseness and top-heaviness, "American Music" offers a lyrical, emotionally bittersweet portrayal of American dreams. Robin Friedman

Review # 2 was written on 2011-01-24 00:00:00 Brian Anderson 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.