by Hannah Howard
For a short time, when I was a teenager, I thought I might be a professional cellist. It turns out I didn’t have the requisite fierce dedication that propels someone to practice for long, long hours every day. It was maybe even more of an impediment that while I enjoyed classical music, I didn’t quite love it. Sure, I was moved by the vivid grace of Bach’s Cello Suites. I savored the buttery tone that I could make with my instrument on my best days. But after I put my cello away in its case, I blasted Bright Eyes and Radiohead alone in my room. That was the music that spoke to me. (Embarrassing, but true. I was 14; it was 2001.)
Kris Faatz’s debut novel To Love a Stranger is at its best when it dives into the mysterious magic of music—the way it captures what cannot be said; the way it transports its makers and listeners to another time and another world; the way it can evoke memory and expand hearts. It’s no wonder that Faatz shines when writing about music. She holds a Masters of Music from Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where I spent most of my childhood Saturdays huddled over my cello in classrooms for private lessons and youth orchestra rehearsals. Faatz worked as a pianist for years, accompanying opera and choral rehearsals at Peabody. To Love a Stanger’s protagonist Jeanette Reilly is an accompanist, too. She’s left her childhood small town for her dream job with the Richmond Symphonic Artists, a struggling orchestra and chorus in Virginia. Back in South Carolina, folks thought her strange for her devotion to piano. At the RSA, she fits right in.
So does Sam Kraycheck, the orchestra’s young, brilliant new “maestro,” who has come from Philadelphia. He’s under pressure to revive the floundering RSA. Sam and Jeanette immediately bond over duets at the piano. As their fingers make music, they connect. They understand what they could not otherwise. The music chips away at the walls that are Jeanette’s shyness and Sam’s secret past. Faatz takes her reader into the music in a way that feels genuine and serious, yet never overly technical. Her sentences make me want to listen to Chopin’s third Ballade, to Brahms’ Hungarian Dances. “When you played, you talked to the instrument, and it answered,” Faatz muses. “The piano had known [Sam] better than any person.”
Jeanette, who falls head over heels for Sam at first sight (and sound! His music is really what does it) certainly doesn’t really know him. She misses what is obvious to the reader: Sam is gay. It’s 1986, the year President Reagan first mentions AIDs, and Sam’s first love is dying from the horrendous disease, bruised and too thin in a Philadelphia hospital. My frustration with To Love a Stranger is that it handles these topics—the big, important stuff at the center of the novel—with kid gloves. It seems to skirt around the very issues it raises. I wanted to hear more about Sam’s struggles a gay man, more about the actual love he felt for his former lover, more about his father’s homophobia, more about his own self-loathing. I want to know what exactly Jeanette is falling for when Sam captures her heart, what she longs for and daydreams about. It’s okay that Sam and Jeanette never really know each other—but as the reader, I want to know them better. I want to know them the way they know their music—the dissonant chords, the searing crescendos, and the gorgeous harmonies. I wish Faatz could approach her characters with the unbridled love she brings to music on the page. And there is plenty of music here. In To Love a Stranger’s best moment, it really sings.
Hannah Howard is a writer and the author of the memoir Feast, True Love in and out of the Kitchen. She lives in New York City.
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