I’ve discovered many terrific books that touch on music in some way: Dana Spiota’s Stone Arabia, for its portrait of a singer/songwriter and his relationship to creativity, success, and self-invention; Nick Hornby’s music esoteria in High Fidelity; and Jonathan Coe’s weaving of music in the lives of working-class characters in The Rotter’s Club. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad includes a fascinating depiction of commercial music and the rock scene, while Pat Lowery Collins’ Hidden Voices: The Orphan Musicians of Venice brings us to 1770s’ Venice and inside an orphanage renowned for its musical program under Vivaldi’s tutelage. I loved Vikram Seth’s insights into playing in a quartet in An Equal Music, and Susan Segal’s Aria for its marvelous depiction of a diva.

But most of all, I love and am inspired by novels about music that allow me to feel I’m actually hearing the music, particularly those in which music serves as a catalyst for transformation. Here are my favorites:

An Evening of Brahms, Richard Sennett

A meditation on the experience of music – what it is to play, listen, or be moved by it. Here a teacher is thinking about Brahms’ piano quartet in C minor:

 A passage of dark harmonies then appears in the strings, six bars in which the players seem to be searching for a center, a place from which to begin. The piano does not help them; once more it rings out stark octaves but this time a tone lower…. Brahms forces the strings to repeat their figure of sighing and emptiness three times. These repetitions increase the tension; confusion is pushed to the breaking point by a string passage of even darker harmonies which do not resolve—and then all at once the piano and the strings push forward together as if in a rage, and the piece is launched.

Appassionata, Eve Hoffman

In this exquisitely written novel, Hoffman explores the role of art in a world of suffering and violence. Here she describes her character, a concert pianist, as she plunges into a performance:

She turns to the opening section of Chopin’s Fourth Ballade, and forgets all else. The theme, with its rueful half-tones, compressed and repetitive like the circling of obsessive thought, the line curling and uncurling from itself, till it eventually expands into openness of major tones and wide arpeggios, pulls her into its vortex till there is nothing outside it.

Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

Opera arias are more powerful than the government in resolving a hostage situation in Patchett’s masterful novel. Here are the thoughts of a man at the moment he is first bewitched by opera:

Without opera, this part of himself would have vanished altogether. It was early in the second act, when Rigoletto and Gilda sang together, their voices twining, leaping, that he reached out for his father’s hand…. The pull they had on him was so strong he could feel himself falling forward out of the high and distant seats. 

In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust  

A phrase of a sonata by a fictitious composer Vinteuil haunts the narrator throughout Proust’s masterpiece. So important is this music to the novel that scholars have argued, since its publication 100 years ago, about Proust’s inspiration. From his own papers, it appears the music that triggered this memory was Camille Saint-Saëns’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in D Minor. This excerpt is from a scene at a private salon gathering where the narrator hears Vinteuil ‘s piece performed:

. . . suddenly enraptured, he had tried to grasp the phrase or harmony—he did not know which—that had just been played and that had opened and expanded his soul, as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating one’s nostrils. . . . This time he had distinguished quite clearly a phrase which emerged for a few moments above the waves of sound.

 Nora Webster – Colm Toibin

An older woman begins to sing again, after decades, and finds solace, engagement, and a true haven in herself. Here she is experiencing her own voice:

 She did not know that her voice could be so deep; and whatever way Laurie was stretching out the notes, she found herself moving much more slowly than she had meant to. She had no trouble with her breathing and no fear now of the higher notes. She felt that the piano was controlling her and pulling her along…. She felt that she was singing into silence; she was aware of the silence as much as she was of the notes.

 Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexi

Alexi takes the magic of music to a new level in the form of an enchanted guitar belonging to bluesman Robert Johnson. At times the guitar talks or plays itself, and it triggers a magical musical odyssey for a misfit rock band. Here are samples of two different characters as they first try out the guitar:

Thomas picked it up, strummed the strings, felt a small pain in the palms of his hands, and heard the first sad note of the reservation blues…. [Victor] played that guitar like a crazy man, and chords and riffs and notes jumped out of that thing like fancydancers. If you looked close enough, you saw the music rising off the strings and frets.

The Soloist – Mark Salzman

This novel can be read as a striking duet between a cello teacher and his brilliant student. I love this metaphor Salzman uses of the sensation of the student’s playing:

Kyung-hee made the arpeggios sound like waves out in mid-ocean, gentle in appearance but with enormous power under the surface.

The Song Is You, Arthur Phillips

In Phillips’ novel, the narrator finds himself increasingly fixated on pop singer Cait O’Dwyer, and becomes a muse for her art. Phillips’s larger theme is how music works its magic on us, and manufactures longing:

 She sang through the laughter, holding the melody like an egg, her voice straining pleasantly, her smile broadening, her breathing heavier than in the demo’s thinner version…Cait had found another splinter of heartbreak.

I am grateful to all these authors as a reader and listener, for enhancing my appreciation for musicians and for music, and as a writer, for inspiring my own fiction.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin, although written in 1899, still has much to say about the lives of women. It’s the story of Edna Pontellier, who comes to the realization that she wants more than a life as a wife and mother. But her awakening ends tragically, as remaking her life and bucking social expectations was simply not possible in those days. This novel was one of the first to question the role of women in society.

The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather (1915). In some ways a self-portrait of Cather as an artist in the making, the heroine, Thea Kronborg, leaves her small hometown to go to the big city to fulfill her dream of becoming a pianist. Instead she discovers her true calling as a singer. The novel focuses on the qualities a woman of that time needed to pursue an artistic career and what she had to sacrifice to reach fulfillment and success.

While I Was Gone: Sue Miller (2000). Second chances and do-overs multiply in this layered novel. Jo Becker leaves her marriage for a bohemian life living under an assumed name, and then, after a tragedy, reinvents herself anew. But her past returns to threaten her happy marriage, and she is seduced by the possibility of yet another self and another life, imperiling everything that matters to her. A look also at pain and forgiveness, the novel asks what we owe ourselves and what we owe those we love.

The Doctor’s Daughter: Hilma Wolitzer (2007).  Beset by midlife malaise –caused by her languishing marriage, by the loss of her career as an editor, by her hapless son who is overly dependent on her – Alice Brill separates from her husband and embraces an affair. Alice has a second chance at love, at renewing her marriage, at helping her son to grow up, and at understanding her parents’ marriage and its impact on her life. The Doctor’s Daughter is that rare novel positing that women of later years can experience passion and fulfillment every bit as intense as younger women.

The Whole World Over: Julia Glass (2007) Greenie Duquette, a baker, frustrated by her husband’s midlife depression and by her own desires, impulsively accepts the offer to be a personal chef – halfway across the country and without her husband. What starts as a chance to expand her career becomes a second chance at a new life. Greenie sets in motion seismic changes in her marriage and encounters a new love, while in her absence her husband faces his demons and recharges his life as well. The Whole World Over is a celebration of a woman’s risk-taking while also showing the consequences of choices.

Amy Falls Down: Jincey Willet (2014).  Amy Gallup isn’t looking for a second chance at fame, but one comes to her anyway. She falls, hits her head on a birdbath, and gives a quirky befuddled interview that sets off a chain of events leading to literary fame and fortune. And it’s not just her writing career that takes off but her writing itself as well. Part biting satire of our sudden-celebrity culture and part a skewering of literary pretention, Amy Falls Down is also a profound look at loneliness and connection. Willet, one of the funniest writers you’ll ever read, gives one of the best depictions I’ve ever read on the experience of a woman of middle/late years living alone – alone, that is, except for the basset hound.

MY NAME IS LAYLA.  My mother said my father insisted they call me that as soon as they knew I was a girl.  He thought the song by Eric Clapton, when he was with Derick and the Dominos, was the best R&R single of all time.  I loved knowing it meant so much to him to name me.  My mother, though always eager to talk about the world and its problems, shied away from anything personal, and so the main thing I knew about my father was that he was dead.

They were ’60s people, my parents.  And that’s what’s brought me to this waiting room where I sit, rubbing my hands over my goose pimpled arms, steeling myself.  After this long, rough summer, I think I finally get what it means to suffer the consequences of your choices.

My mother was always trying to convince me that we are all tied up in history and politics – who we are, even what we think.  The personal is political, she would say, and, all politics is personal.  She was a Women’s Studies teacher, an antiwar activist, a placard-wearing, union-ballad-singing Leftie.  She was always pointing things out in the paper or on the news, trying to “engage” me.  But I wouldn’t engage.  I resented the politics that took so much of her attention.  And I believed—I wanted to believe—that I could escape being shaped by anyone or anything I didn’t choose.

I no longer believe in escape.

The door opens, and a guard beckons.  I stand so quickly I bang my knee, but the sharp pain helps clear my head.  Was this what my mother was hoping for with her elaborate scheme, the promise she asked of me—that by drawing me in to her secrets, I’d end up every bit as implicated as she was?nbsp; Forced to become involved, to take a stand?nbsp; Because wasn’t that her point—that we’re all, in some way or another, implicated?

Still, I want to believe that it was much simpler, something that doesn’t have to do with politics at all: that my mother wanted to give me what I had been denied, and that she wanted my forgiveness.

Lily watched her son walk away, the loose, jaunty shamble of him, the brave uptilt of his head, and felt just as she had when she abandoned him to kindergarten what seemed such a short time ago.

“Oh, sweetheart,” her husband said. Around them families bunched, kissing and parting in kaleidoscopic movement. Stephen touched her sleeve. She looked into his impish eyes and saw he felt none of her pain. In that moment she resented what she had always loved: his good cheer, his emotional maturity, his security in himself. Men!

But her son, walking into his future, he was a man now, too.

“Ready to eat?” Stephen clasped her hand.

What was there to say A son leaving home, starting college, a mother grieving—a cliché. But it was her cliché. And what she felt was not so much bereft and sad and teary, though it was all that. What she felt was drained and ugly, as if she’d been turned instantly into an old woman—sagging breasts, spindly legs, crooked back—well, it would all happen soon enough, wouldn’t it?

Still. It was a storybook campus with beautiful, dove-gray stone buildings around a key lime–green quad. Colby would get a good liberal education here; he would be happy.

Stephen swung her hand back and forth as if to cajole her into better spirits. “That sophomore at orientation mentioned a restaurant,” he added.

Lily’s stomach felt as if she had consumed the contents of her sock drawer.

“It will pass,” Stephen said, in that way he had, sometimes, of reading her mind.

They jostled through people crisscrossing like random molecules, behind a couple in matching khaki slacks, blue fleece pullovers, jaunty cotton hats, the kind of couple she and Stephen—independent, strong—knew they would never be. But right now she wished they were more entwined, alike. Right now she hated feeling so alone.

“My life is empty,” she said as they reached their car.

Stephen stopped short and guffawed.

“I’m serious.” She didn’t look at him as she unlocked the door and slid behind the wheel.

“You’re always complaining you’re too busy.”

Her mind scrolled through images: her office, meetings of the block association, lunches. It suddenly seemed like nothing. She shook her head.

“You’ll feel better in a few days.”

They pulled up to a small timber-frame building with fading purple trim that must once have been a private residence. A hostess who didn’t make eye contact seated them far from the bar, where body-pierced youths were making phenomenal amounts of noise.

“In fact, you’ll feel better in a matter of minutes,” Stephen said.

He was not taking her seriously. In a matter of minutes, she was going to go from teary to cranky, and if this kept up she’d be picking a fight in the car. She’d make a wrong turn and they’d be lost in the Bronx, just like in Bonfire of the Vanities, yelling at each other. In fact, if she weren’t careful, they’d be filing for divorce by morning.

“They have croque-monsieurs,” he said and folded his arms. Case closed.

He knew her too well.