Published on November 14, 2002
CU Grad Hackett Makes Splash with Debut Novel
Disturbance of the Inner Ear has brought acclaim to the neighbourly author, who is also a CB9 activist.
By Margaret Hunt Gram
Spectator Staff Writer
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Joyce Hackett's new book, Disturbance of the Inner Ear, has earned high praise from critics.
Courtesy of Joyce Hackett
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Out in the real world, Joyce Hackett, SOA '90, is the model community activist. She is president of Morningside Heights Neighbors, a member of Community Board 9, and the chair of the Tri-Community Coalition. She spends her time drumming up financial support for park maintenance and fighting Columbia neighborhood projects that she considers inappropriately handled.
But in the privacy of her 113th Street apartment, Joyce Hackett has another life. From 1987 to 2002, she spent much of each day sitting at a white desk, listening to cello music and writing a novel.
That novel was tossed into forty different publishers' rejection piles. Too dark, the publishers said; too stylistically strange. Who wants to read about the children of Holocaust survivors?
Those publishers are probably hanging their heads this month as they read the national book reviews. Publishers Weekly called Hackett's novel Disturbance of the Inner Ear --finally published this year by Carroll & Graf--"defiantly out of the ordinary." Hackett has been compared to masterful modern novelist Jean Rhys. Kirkus declared it "a startling, memorable debut," praising Hackett's "stinging stylistic flair."
Disturbance of the Inner Ear tells the story of Isabel Masurovsky, a former prodigy cellist. Isabel has not played since the death of her father, a pianist and Holocaust survivor who taught her extreme, paralyzing rules for survival. The arc of the story concerns Isabel finding someone to witness her struggle and help her unlearn those rules.
Despite the long years of uncertainty, Hackett does not regret the time she spent writing, rewriting, and agonizing over her book. "Eight years into the writing process, I just wasn't convinced the book I had produced was good enough," she said. And it was out of the discouragement of rejection that she stumbled upon her other fulfilling persona.
"I thought, 'I need another life, here!'" Hackett said. "And I found one. I just walked down to the Community Board at 125th Street, and I found a community that was very different than the academic community in which I work."
Having long been uneasy about "the class and race differentiation that such an institution encourages," Hackett felt an unparalleled satisfaction in becoming part of communities in Harlem and Hamilton Heights, where the economic and racial demographics are significantly different from Columbia's.
"I hadn't ever been in rooms that were so equally divided racially before," Hackett said, "and I really, really liked it."
She also considers activism a good writer's activity. "Writing's so solitary, so it's great to just go out and be with a lot of people," she said. "People always think that writers have such glamorous lives, but writers have about the least glamorous lives of anybody, because we sit at our computers all day long, typing. When we want to get really glamorous, we pace back and forth."
But even as she worked in the community, Hackett kept writing. She was composing a story about "the rules that we learn from a catastrophe, and the problem of unlearning those rules once they are no longer useful."
The "power of witnessing" is one of the book's major themes. Having another person hear and understand a traumatic experience, Hackett said, helps put that experience to rest. "I was writing about trauma ... and the healing power of being witnessed by another human being," she said. "And the more that I wrote the book, the more research that I did about children of survivors, the more I came to see how being witnessed by another person for what you've gone through is the most profoundly healing experience that one can have."
Hackett learned about trauma and witnessing through an extraordinarily intense face-to-face research process. As she began to write her novel while a student of Columbia's writing program in the School of the Arts, Hackett had the revelation that Isabel must be the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. She envisioned Isabel's father as a survivor of Theresienstadt, a transit camp where 120,000 Czech Jewish musicians were forced to perform for the Nazis, stripped of all belongings, and then killed or sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Because she knew little about Theresienstadt at the time, Hackett contacted the Holocaust Museum in Washington, to ask the museum to send out a blind query to all the survivors of the camp. More than 40 survivors and their families responded, and Hackett traveled the United States and Europe to interview them all.
"That in itself--that kind of immersion--it was fascinating, and it was also harrowing," Hackett said. "Talking to them made me realize what I was doing and why I was doing it."
As is evident from the reviews, the whole book "works." The Chicago Tribune called Hackett "a writer of considerable merit--and even greater promise," and she is currently working on the fulfillment of that promise: her next novel. In the novel, Hackett will write about the community that she has found and claimed. The book will be set in Manhattanville, which Hackett describes as "one of the last villages in Manhattan;" it is an area under the jurisdiction of CB9.
As for the activism, Hackett will stick with that as well. "I love trying to get money for our little park and getting the pothole filled in front of the bus stop at 114th Street after eight years of having people get splashed every rain storm," she said. "Things like that, they're just small--and they don't have your name on them. But ... you're the person behind the mark, whether or not people know it. It's very satisfying."
Hackett wants her book to make a difference, too. She said she hopes that her book will do for her readers what other books have done for her.
"There have been some books that have saved my life," she said. "When I thought that I was completely isolated and that nobody could possibly understand what I was going through, I read books whose greatness made many more things possible to express."
The "power of witnessing," then, is what saved Hackett--and is what she hopes her book will do for other people.
"I think once you can express what you're experiencing, you master it in some ways; no matter how difficult an experience it is, you can master it."
The sound of an old car struggling to start on 113th Street gave her pause. She corrected herself. "Or--that's wrong," she said. "You don't master it. It becomes bearable."
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