By Michael Upchurch. Michael Upchurch's novels include "The Flame Forest" and "Passive Intruder." He is the book critic for The Seattle Times

Published September 22, 2002

Disturbance of the Inner Ear

By Joyce Hackett

Carroll & Graf, 277 pages, $25

One sign that you've stumbled across a wily new voice in fiction is that you keep comparing her to other writers, and the comparisons won't stick.

While reading Joyce Hackett's debut novel, "Disturbance of the Inner Ear," I found myself scribbling notes about "syntax-slip eccentricities akin to Penelope Fitzgerald's," or simply jotting down names--Beryl Bainbridge, Cynthia Ozick, Irene Dische--as they came into my head.

Finally I gave up on other writers altogether and turned to choreography. Thus: "Reading Joyce Hackett is like watching an elegant dancer continually playing with steps that are perilously off-balance."

But never mind the comparisons. What matters is "Disturbance of the Inner Ear" is no ordinary first novel. Ambitious, darkly comedic, unhinged at times, it takes on one of the stranger chapters of Holocaust history and much else besides. It is steeped in classical music lore, especially the literature for the cello (Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time" plays a key role). It also finds fresh blood in that old stomping ground of Henry James': the American in Europe.

Isabel Masurovsky is a former U.S. cello prodigy, now in her 20s, who hasn't played in public or even out loud (she does still practice mute) for nearly a decade. When we meet her, her 77-year-old teacher-lover Signor Perso, back in his native Milan, Italy, for the first time in 40 years, has just died, leaving her stranded.

Her immediate reaction is to burn her passport and practice Signor Perso's traveler's-check signature. But the "giddy, untethered possibility" of inventing herself anew, following the death of the last person "who knew who I'd been," promptly evaporates. As she later puts it, "The thought of trying to get to know people, of constructing a new person they could want to get to know, was exhausting."

She is, however, short of cash and in dire need of taking some practical action. Her one offer is to teach cello to Clayton, the talentless teenage son of Mr. Pettyward, a wealthy American instrument collector who's a friend of a friend of the late Signor Perso. Alas, the gig is already a fiasco, for following her job interview Isabel impulsively spirited away Pettyward's prize cello: the Savant, built by Andrea Amati (Stradivari's 16th Century predecessor) and not seen publicly since its confiscation from a legendary Jewish cellist by the Nazis.

It's while lost in the snowy streets of Milan, dragging the priceless Savant through the slush, that Isabel literally falls before the man who could either be her salvation or her nemesis: Giulio Salvagente, a 32-year-old surgeon with a sideline as a gigolo. Giulio proves extraordinarily adept at falling in with the lies that the hapless Isabel keeps telling. He's also powerfully attracted to her, much to her mystification (she describes herself as "a short, ample tribute to Russian peasanthood").

Giulio isn't the only one drawn to Isabel. Sixteen-year-old Clayton Pettyward, initially "impenetrable" and decidedly eccentric (he likes to eat dog biscuits), also falls for her in a big way. And she isn't entirely immune to his clumsy charms.

Her love life may span the generations, but the man who truly dominates her is her dead father, Yuri. A refugee from Stalin's Russia, he wound up in the U.S. via Czechoslovakia and Theresienstadt, the latter being the Nazis' attempt at a Potemkin village: On its surface an "upscale" Jewish arts ghetto, complete with orchestras and chamber groups, it was in truth a transit point to the death camps, with a high mortality rate itself. Yuri's survival there owed much to blind chance, but also something to his skills as a pianist. "Yuri told me," Isabel recalls, "that if I learned to play well enough, my playing would protect me. That bad people crumbled if they heard Beethoven or Bach."

That's a lot of pressure to place on a performer, and it's accompanied by still more paralyzing burdens. Isabel's fame as a prodigy climaxed with a Carnegie Hall recital at 14, the very night her parents were killed in a car crash. Her girlhood concert tours always included Yuri-led side trips to contact other camp survivors. Her father's tutelage extended beyond musical matters to survival techniques for Third Reich-like situations (never mind that they didn't exactly apply to a postwar world). A final onus: Young Isabel was made far more aware than her serenely oblivious American opera-singer mother of how Yuri's camp experience had blighted him to the point of madness.

It's no surprise, then, that Isabel, as she scrambles to make sense of her situation and talents in Milan, is also trying to come to terms with the ghosts of Yuri and Nazi Europe. She has a more interior battle to fight, as well, against a superstition instilled by her Carnegie Hall experience that any freedom in performance she enjoys comes at the price of death or harm to someone she loves. In both cases, the stolen Savant cello will play a role in whatever rite she devises to put the past behind her.

Hackett plainly isn't averse to a little melodrama. Yet the tone of her book, while always volatile, is rarely overwrought. Even the final chapter, which strains credulity and feels saddled with too much stage business in some passages, hurtles toward an endgame that feels scarily stark and inevitable.

In the meantime, Hackett strews a number of lively and/or grotesque comic figures across our path. Giulio, adept at being so many things to so many women, is stumped when it comes to Isabel. He's a wryly elegant Eurocreature, an erotic performer who's always "on" with the compliments, even when it comes to the bags under Isabel's eyes:

"Really, I like them. They make you look like a depressed Russian countess."

Hackett knows just how to play him for what he's worth, which is more than one might suppose.

Mr. Pettyward (wonderful name!) and his son also provide quite a sideshow. Pettyward, whose wife is unaccounted for (Isabel oddly assumes that she, too, died in a car crash), is a clueless, persnickety bully, only half aware of what a treasure he has in the Savant, and equally at sea when it comes to Clayton ("He's eligible for MENSA," he complains, "but he's too stubborn to join"). Wherever Clayton's talent lies, it isn't in music, even if he hums under his breath continually ("a dazed, hypnotic cloud devoid of melody") and likes to conduct invisible orchestras from upper-story windows.

A final figure in the farce is Signor Perso's friend Anna-Maria, nicknamed "Marie-Antoinette." Part of Milan's face-lift set, she almost immediately skedaddles off to Paris, Brazil and other locales, but phones in regularly.

As for Isabel, she's a winningly mordant desperado, more stunned than bitter about the ramifications of having once been a "lucky wunderkind" with a gifted if disturbed musical ear. As she flails beneath the weight of too much history, her struggles lend the book a frenetic surface with a driving pulse beneath it, eventually landing the reader in some harrowing territory indeed.

Hackett's observations veer from the offbeat ("A car makes you an armadillo; you drag a big, clunking hull of a self along, wherever you go") to the forthright:

"Is it even possible to reconstruct the unbearable? Or is the story that sticks as memory simply the version that allows you to bear the chaos, the bridge over the abyss that lets you walk on?"

That's stating the book's central question a little baldly. But Hackett, with the complications, ironies and antic desperations she masters elsewhere in the novel, earns the right to ask it straight out. And in taking on such questions, she proves herself a writer of considerable merit--and even greater promise.