Bel Canto

Currently reading this novel by Ann Patchett. I love the clarity and precision of her writing; I'm not sure why she felt compelled to write this novel, however. What was the burning question she was trying to answer? I know I'm not the first one to say this, but I'll say it anyway: all novelists are trying to answer one penultimate question in their novels--one issue that has always plagued them, something having to do with human relations or animal-vegetable relations or relations of some sort. One question, or at the most, a set of related questions.

Novelists are obsessed about--something. I don't know what Ann Patchett is obsessed about, except, perhaps, observing how people from very different walks of life react to each other. Her novel works as a diversion from quotidian life, a way to relax a little before going to bed. But it also feels like someone moving players around on a chess board. After a while, watching chess pieces move about can seem very dull. I want to know more about what the pawns and bishops and kings are thinking and why they're thinking it. And when a novel burns with the novelist's unanswered question, the reader can feel that urgency in each line of the book--it runs through every sentence like an electric current. I don't feel such a thing occurring with this novel. Each time I put the book down I wonder whether I'll pick it up again.

Needless to say, I have very little time these days to read novels. Yet I've also felt, recently, a desperate need to plunge into different worlds. Even if it only lasts about fifteen minutes, this escape into a novel means that I can stop functioning on the very practical, hyper-aware level that motherhood forces on me. So--yes, okay, Ann Patchett isn't Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Kafka or Austen; but she's good enough to take me out of myself, for brief snatches of time. And Bel Canto tries to combine two disparate subjects, music and politics, in an interesting way. I'll probably keep reading.