Book Review: The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

Hmm, I don't know where to start. My mom picked this up at the library because it's Washington State's book of the year or something. Then she said she had other stuff to read but someone in the family should read it because the government told us to, so she gave it to me. On the one hand this is a very ambitious first novel, and the research behind the setting is truly phenomenal; on the other hand, the fact that it is a first novel shows a bit. Perhaps I've learnt so much about deconstructing and analyzing texts that I cannot read anything without finding a flaw.

Or perhaps the book world is so flooded with 'luminous', 'intoxicating' books full of 'mystical lushness' that some neominimalist will soon have to build an ark. Don't get me wrong, it was nice at first. But the introverted, brilliant Victorian specialist in a rare field who is sent to a faraway land? Been done. The feverish dream-reality? Been done. The repressed middle-aged man in a second youth? Been done. The artistic temperament against a harsh, cold world? Um, been done. The confusing alliances and sudden, penultimate-page inversion of all your preconceptions? It used to be shocking, now it's been done. The exotic, but partially Westernized, beauty who nearly causes a man to forget the beloved wife at home? Been done. The gentle, barely sexual longing that comes close to consummation but never gets there? Been done many, many times. Unnamed emptiness? et cetera.

Slightly pedestrian, this book is Girl with a Pearl Earring and Falling Angels with piano strings instead of paint—maybe it should have been titled The Well-Tempered Clavier. It is Easter Island with a male star. It is Mason & Dixon to the Anglo-Burman wars. It is Invisible Man with the violence in the background. It is 'Interpreter of Maladies' without the realistic bits. It is The Dogs of Babel without a reason for the quest. It is Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with Asians. It is a bunch of books I plucked from the local library's New shelf in a high-school search for Reality but have now forgotten. In short, it reads like an Oprah's Book Club selection (which isn't bad, East of Eden was my favorite book before she made it a bestseller, and she couldn't have chosen better).

While my frustration with the tired-out genre of what James Wood calls 'hysterical realism' does not necessarily mean that The Piano Tuner is actually poorly written. It's not. The descriptions of Burma are wonderful and probably accurate since Mason wrote most of the book while studying malaria on the border of Thailand and Myanmar. His prose is restrained and precise. The flaw lies in Mason's piano tuner, yet it's hard to put a finger on the problem. He thinks too much. A man frightened by the tightening in his stomach when he meets a beautiful exotic-but-not-too-exotic woman would not think about it at all. Not in words. He would not decipher his feelings for fear that he wouldn't like what he found. For a man whose emotions are songs, he sees a lot more of the countryside than he hears it. The moments when Mason remembers to have his protagonist notice sounds in the landscape are forced, few, and far between. The piano tuner also lacks baggage. His past is a few vignettes, though even a boring man has plenty of memories to color his experiences by the time he's forty-one. He dreams always of mystical things he's never seen, never of old friends and old places. He has few physical needs; his mind exists in a perfect body.

Now I'm tired of this book and of trying and failing to exactly place the déjà vu it recalled.