Partita by Barbara Kingsolver: What keeps people from their birthright in beauty?

Partita

Author: Barbara Kingsolver

ISBN-13: 978-0-571-40472-8

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Guideline Price: £20; 338pp

Forty years after she documented women’s lives during the 1983 Phelps Dodge miners’ strike in Arizona – an act of witness that led to her first book, 1989’s Holding the Line – Barbara Kingsolver herself held the line in a union work stoppage for the first time. As a member of the Writers Guild of America, she closed her keyboard in 2023 with her fellow screenwriters, striking for improved healthcare and protection against the corporate fetish for AI.

Asking how to create safety and community around both industry and art, those two strikes could be said to parent Kingsolver’s new novel; the offspring doesn’t talk about them outright, but it has their eyes.

Over the past four decades, Kingsolver has proven why her surname would make a damn fine brand name for a guillotine. Her novels can be as large, righteous and billion-footed as a No Kings protest. But years before she took up the sweeping social novel, she was a music student – studying piano, just like the protagonist of Partita – before she left music theory to pursue the sciences and journalism in the American southwest.

Partita is a story of aspiration, romance, disappointment and reconciliation; and though it’s a first-person suite of memories, it seems to take its bearings from structural questions about the instrumentality of women’s artistic ambitions and the creation of art as undercompensated labour. It drags in the middle, but Kingsolver jolts even its most unhurried stretches with aphorism: “Other than relief at escaping a lifetime of debt, I was having trouble locating my feelings.” Or: “You can learn a lot about your belongings from throwing them off the roof.”

In 1989 teenage pianist Livia Bohusz escapes the abuse of her Kentucky childhood home on a scholarship to an Indiana music conservatory. Reflecting on that “year of earthquakes and oil spills and iron curtains starting to crash”, Livia reminisces from middle age that “our options then were different and also maybe about the same” as they are in today’s America.

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While at university, Livia begins a passionate affair with Sigurd, a hot labour organiser resentful of campus indifference, who soon leaves her heartbroken, financially vulnerable and rusticated from the stage by a terrible hand injury. Sigurd heads off to Arizona in his own arc of futility, shortly after his author witnessed the movement there being decimated.

When, in the overture of the novel, Livia hears from Sigurd again after decades, she has one week to decide whether or not to reunite. Those seven days of deliberation each get a chapter titled “Prelude”, alternating with movements into the past titled with (and tutoring us in the musical meanings of) terms such as “Sarabande” and “Fugue” and “Pathétique”. A partita, as Livia explains to Sigurd, is “a composition made of a lot of parts with different paces and moods ... and the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole”.

In Partita, Kingsolver relishes classical music as a source of discipline and splendour while recognising the precarity of its vanishing career opportunities. Beyond classical music, it might be more accurate to think of the book’s focus as art and the public domain. Since everyone can possess Bach and Chopin, the question becomes: who has the right combination of deracinated accent and approved upbringing, unbought time and institutional access to a heavy piano that’s required to “stand up among us to play or sing real music, one breathing soul to another”?

What keeps people from their birthright in beauty? Kingsolver dramatises how reproductive rights are artists’ rights – the way an unplanned pregnancy, in a country that routinely torments people seeking abortion, can upend a career and contribute to the suppression of a potential agent of harmony.

Partita is very much a reaction to the maximalist success of Kingsolver’s last novel, Demon Copperhead, which retold Dickens’s David Copperfield in opiate-riddled contemporary Appalachia. When Livia finally marries a stoic, loving man, her sister-in-law can’t decide if the couple are “like a Charlotte Brontë novel or a Thomas Hardy novel. Definitely a novel. I said I wanted to be the one where nobody dies”. Mercifully, in a book that contains a Jude’s worth of severe trauma, they suffer only minor allusions.

That self-consciousness about accumulation and the repetition of prior scripts finds its correlative in a subplot in which Livia must enter her dead mother’s house and dispose of the sedimentation of a lifetime’s hoarding. Here a novel so committed across most of its pages to the intricacy of touch must convince us that the ultimate good is to release your grip. What lingers are frequent moments where Livia practises her fingering of the repertoire on the skin of her partners. This tactile tale finds unity in the proposal that any hand can make music, heard or unheard, from its play along any material surface.

Greg Londe teaches literatures in English at Cornell University and lives in Wexford