Each year I receive two or three dozen forthcoming books from writers or their publicists who are hoping I’ll read and help to promote these titles. It’s flattering to be asked, and although I wish I could, I don’t have time to read them all.

Most readers know, whether or not they’re also writers, that the number of books published each year is staggeringly high. Increasingly, authors must do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to publicizing their books, whether their publishers are large corporate houses or independent or university presses.

When I read Justin Courter’s third novel, Cadenza, published by the Boulder, Colorado-based Owl Canyon Press, it struck me as more engaging and propulsive than almost any of the most well publicized and celebrated novels I’d read in the last few years.

An extraordinary work of the imagination, Cadenza centers on Jennifer Coleman, a world-class concert pianist who ascends to the height of her profession, despite suffering catastrophic losses at a very young age, ones that left her with horrific scars, literal and figurative.

Courter is a writer with impressive range—from humor pieces published in McSweeney’s, Slackjaw, Points in Case, to prose poems published in his wry and original collection The Death of the Poem and Other Paragraphs, to complex long-form fiction. Cadenza, Courter’s new novel, is one I hope will find a large and appreciative audience. — Christine Sneed

Christine Sneed interviewed Courter for The National. Their conversation was conducted primarily over email.

Q: I’m not sure how you pulled it off in a book about a badly burned girl whose younger sister dies in a house fire when they are very young (7 and 5 years old, respectively), but Cadenza is extremely funny at times. Is your default mode the comic, as John Updike once said about his own writing style? Who are some of your influences?

A: I suppose yes, my default mode is the comic. And in Cadenza I was often thinking about ways to inject humor because the subject matter was pretty dark, and I needed to balance it. Tragicomic seems to be my preferred kind of comic. I love John Updike. The Rabbit novels made a huge impression on me, and I was reading them around the time I wrote Cadenza.

Some other influences on my writing—or, anyway, authors whose work I try to emulate—are Richard Ford, Edith Wharton, and Graham Greene. There were direct influences on Cadenza that I was very conscious of while I was writing it. I had in mind the abrasive voice of Peggy Cort in Elizabeth McCracken's The Giant's House. And I was thinking about the revelation of childhood trauma, and a strong woman coping with it, in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres. 

Q: Cadenza's chronology is non-linear, with chapters in the present of protagonist Jennifer Coleman's life interleaved with others giving us context for her past, which includes a fascinating trajectory to global stardom as a classical pianist. Was this structure there from the outset?

A: Yes, the flashback-type structure was there from the beginning. I conceived the novel as something Jennifer would be writing from the vantage point of a particular juncture in her life, in her late thirties. The novel would be a bildungsroman and (tragic) success story without much inherent suspense, so jumping back and forth chronologically was a way of creating suspense. 

I was also thinking of the structure as vaguely musical—a character appearing and then returning the way a theme recurs in a symphony, and a kind of verse-chorus-verse feel, with the chorus being the “now” of the novel and episodes from Jennifer's past being verses. There were advantages to writing this way. It made it easier to focus on a pivotal scene in Jennifer's life, explore it in detail, and then just cut to the next one. It also made it easier for me in each chapter to concentrate on Jennifer's relationship with a different character that was important to her life story.

Q: Jennifer is a character unlike any I’ve encountered before. She’s the world’s best pianist, possibly ever, but severely damaged. She does fall in love with another burn victim, however, Felix, a talented artist who has bipolar disorder. Where on earth did they come from—your labyrinthine subconscious, actual people, some combination of the two?

A: These characters are inventions that served what I wanted to express about art, about process, characters that would help me access particular emotions. Cadenza is mainly about seeing art as a matter of life and death. Jennifer’s character embodies the relentless drive of someone determined to use her talent to overcome her life circumstances.

Felix’s character is an expression of raw, explosive creativity. I use all kinds of things from life and art, consciously and unconsciously, to create characters, so I usually couldn’t say exactly how much of one character was drawn from where, what, or whom.

Q: How do you know so much about music and virtuosos? Are you a musician as well as a writer? You also know a lot about the medical treatment for serious burn victims. Talk a bit about the research you did while writing Cadenza. 

A: Fooled you—no, I’m not a musician. I came by all I know about music and piano virtuosos the way one might expect a writer to—by going to the library. I read about the lives of concert pianists and composers. Glenn Gould was especially interesting, and I think some of his personality is a part of Jennifer's. I visited Juilliard, just to get a feel for the place, and read what musicians had said and written about attending Juilliard. Similarly, I read about burn victims and about their medical treatment. I visited Shriners Burns Institute in Boston and spoke to a couple of people there. 

A couple of years before I started writing Cadenza, I had a job as a proofreader in the (long gone) medical division of Little, Brown & Co. Some of the books I worked on were about the treatment of burn victims; the photographs of the people before and after surgery were very disturbing. It was something that stayed with me. I didn't know it at the time, but later it was going to be one of the reasons for Cadenza. Part of the imaginative exercise of the novel was trying to inhabit the mind of someone living with severe disfigurement, and thinking about how it might affect every aspect of her life.

Q: Cadenza is elegantly written as well as psychologically complex and suspenseful. Did you write numerous drafts, and did the first full draft arrive in a feverish rush or was it slower to take shape?

A: Thank you. As an admirer of your work, I am very glad you like it. I’d say Cadenza was slower to take shape. It evolved as I did research and I kept wanting to incorporate more and more peripheral characters and extra scenes. The original draft of Cadenza was more than a hundred pages longer than the version that has been published. Going over it, putting it aside, going over it again, many times, I saw that it served the story to cut out a lot of extraneous stuff, including characters and story lines that meandered too far from the main story.

That said, there were many scenes that—after thinking about them and roughly outlining them—once I sat down to draft them, did come in a feverish rush. I think this is because they had basically been rehearsed, though there was improvisation during the drafting of them. That always feels great.

Q: I love all the ‘80s and ‘90s pop culture references – Felix is a Def Leppard fan and also has his own band named the Deaf Lepers. Jennifer, as a classical pianist, is especially enamored of Bach and finds Felix’s musical taste questionable, to put it politely. Above you mention Glenn Gould as an influence on your characterization of Jennifer. Please talk more about this—like Jennifer, for example, he has perfect pitch, and his mother also played piano constantly while she was pregnant with him. 

A: If you read about concert pianists, you can’t avoid Gould, and he was so colorful, unorthodox, and fascinating. And even to a lay person, his Bach interpretations are decidedly different. Like Jennifer, he was, ostensibly, composing after he quit the concert stage, but I don’t think he did a lot of it.

He did other interesting things, including some funny television programs. And like Jennifer he grew to despise the whole public relations side of the music business. Jennifer doesn’t go in for the kind of histrionics Gould did during performances though—her physical appearance is enough to set her apart as a performer. The main point of similarity is that they both decided to quit at the height of fame to become a recluse. It creates a kind of mystique the way it did when Salinger decided to stop publishing and become something of a hermit in New Hampshire.

Q: Jennifer has been estranged from her parents ever since the house fire that took her sister’s life and resulted in her own severe disfigurement. She’s hard on them both, but most especially on Betty, her mother. I found Betty to be sympathetic, however, despite how Jennifer portrays her. Are our sympathies supposed to reside fully with Jennifer? And would you say Jennifer is an unreliable narrator to a certain extent, at least in regard to her parents?

A: Yes, Jennifer is an unreliable narrator and especially hard on her mother. I think our sympathies can be with all three of them. Jennifer’s parents are ordinary people coping with trauma and loss in ordinary ways. Jennifer is extraordinary and her manner of coping is extraordinary.

Her attitude is essentially, “I was devastated and now I’m going to devastate everyone else with my talent.” She wants to set the world on fire. Whether or not she recalls the events of her life the way they actually happened is almost beside the point; the narrative she constructs is the one that gives her the fuel for her fire.

Q: Jennifer’s most influential piano teacher is Gustav Humbolt who is a wonderful character—a Julliard professor who is outsized in talent, generosity, and Mountain Dew consumption. He steals every scene he appears in. I must also ask, where in the heck did he come from?

A: Thank you, I’m proud of Gustav. He was necessary as a counterpoint to Jennifer. She is very serious, and part of what she needs to learn to be more successful as an artist is to lighten up. So, temperamentally, physically, they are almost opposites. He is an impish, jesting, little old master and she is a tall, solemn virtuoso. Jennifer blew right through all her early piano teachers, basically in search of a true mentor, and it’s not until she meets Gustav that someone challenges her and is qualified to mentor her. He’s also someone who had to overcome difficult things.

I wanted Gustav to be a study in contrasts, so he’s a dapper little man in a three piece suit who guzzles Mountain Dew, tells silly jokes, throws things out the window and is always practically vibrating with enthusiasm. For Gustav, the making of sublime art is what is important—it doesn’t matter so much to him who made it.

 

Christine Sneed is the author of three novels and three story collections, most recently, Direct Sunlight (stories). She’s also the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of Time’s Up, and her work has been included in publications such as The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Story, New England Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and the New York Times. She lives in Pasadena, CA and teaches for Northwestern University and Stanford University.