This turned out to be phenomenally good. I felt compelled to write a review not only because I loved it, but because I suspect the title may give the erroneous impression that the book is only for music lovers. I strongly believe it will resonate with a lot more readers than those who care about Bach. I, for starters, root for Beethoven. And Brahms, and Dvorak, and Shostakovich. Bach is not a composer I feel the need to listen to on a regular basis. (You can judge, I'll get over it.) So, you may ask, which audiences will the book resonate with? The many people out there who have had a complicated relationship with their unhappy, complex mother nursing stifled hopes and increasing resentment for her child while they were growing up. See, I've just expanded the market for Kennicott's memoir about ten thousand fold, or shall we say one hundred thousand? Either is a conservative estimate. This book deserves to be widely read.
I bought the book because the author is a Pulitzer-Prize winning art and music critic at the Washington Post and I like his reporting. The first chapter was enticing enough, and it helped that I decided to listen to various recordings of the Goldberg Variations while I read. (The two by Glenn Gould, of course - I don't care about Bach but I care about piano, and I care about contemporary geniuses who went off the beaten path, so of course I had Gould's landmark recordings - but also the one by Simone Dinnerstein.) Then I realized the book was about mourning his mother who had brought him to piano lessons, and I started having misgivings because (apparently) happy stories about mothers and their children sharing a common cultural interest in a healthy relationship tend to make me sad that I don't have that with my mother. So I started finding flaws with the book, which was more a reflection of my state of mind. Throughout chapters two, three and four, when young Kennicott starts learning the piano, I insisted that the book was boring, that it should have some snippets of Bach's scores to enliven the page, that this account of Kennicott's learning the piano was a self-indulgence of a music critic whose book would never have found a publisher otherwise, that hopefully when the publisher send Kennicott on book tour they would ask local music students to play a variation or two of the Goldbergs because this way perhaps the audience would make a pity purchase of the book after the event (you can tell I was being triggered by the impression the book was about a happy mother-child relationship around the piano). I kept musing: should I stop now? try to read the first page of each subsequent chapter to save time while pretending I had read it in its entirety? should I give it two or three stars on Goodreads.com? Maybe three stars saying it really deserved two, with one extra star for the author being the WaPo music critic.
And then came Chapter Five. And ladies and gentlemen, this turned into a six-stars-out-of-five book in a snap. After its slow start (or perhaps I missed the clues, sorry if I did) the book transformed into a gem. You see, the relationship between mother and child was, instead of happy, very complicated. I don't want to spoil the enjoyment of reading the book but there was a shocking incident at the beginning of Chapter Five between mother and son that for me showed Kennicott's mother as, in fact, showing a probably case of borderline personality disorder. (I know it is less than advisable to play the armchair psychiatrist and diagnose someone when Kennicott never does, but I am trying to give a sense of what turned the book for me without ruining the surprise for the reader.) And suddenly his mother resembled mine so much more, and at long last I felt someone had written a book about mothers that pays homage to complex mothers with their flaws and their fears and their resentments at their life not turning the way they wanted and how it got reflected on their behavior toward their family, without judging them, without blaming them, without making this a caricature, but instead with empathy and honesty and fairness. In today's society mothers are glorified and occasionally someone famous will admit having had a difficult mother - helicopter mothers are becoming a little cliche these days - but I've never read such a spot-on portrait of my own relationship in someone else's book and I am just so happy that someone could pull it off without coming across as settling scores or nursing a grudge. Instead, Kennicott honors the relationship without embellishing it and his account rings true. It comes as no surprise that he was only able to write this book several years after his mother's passing.
After that point I just couldn't put the book down and adored every single page of it. Suddenly, the insights on Bach seemed judicious and pertinent and illuminated my understanding of the Goldberg Variations - I honestly can't even say what Kennicott wrote about Bach in Chapters Two through Four because I was so determined to find the book boring, I will have to read those chapters again. Chapter Eight hit a home run as well because it describes Kennicott's friendship with his piano teacher Joseph Fennimore, whose piano lineage reaches back to Ludwig van Beethoven himself. Then in Chapter Nine, Nathan the Dog makes his entrance, and you have to read that chapter and hear how that dog reacts to Bach and - at the end of the chapter - the probable explanation as to why.
I have underlined many passages in my copy of the book, most of which only have meaning for me, but here are a few quotes I will leave you with. (Summary: Kennicott can write.)
P.232 of hardcover edition: "We are a curious species. We spend much of our lives doing one thing in order to do another, having children to fix marriages, running marathons to heal psychic traumas, learning music to lessen grief... We muddle through life in order to get somewhere, we suffer in order to be happy, we live in order to have had a life."
P.237: "Had she been merely cruel and capricious, I might have hated her. But all along I saw also the woundedness of her life... When I sat on her deathbed, it wasn't just the fear of my own mortality that pierced me. It was the helplessness of watching an unhappy life come to an unhappy end."
Buy. This. Book.
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