Weber, Katharine: The Music Lesson

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Art historian Patricia Dolan is biding her time in a rented Irish cottage, waiting for the perilous business she's become involved in to pan out, waiting for her newly discovered distant cousin/lover Mickey to join her. In the meantime she is enjoying the life rural Ireland has to offer in the off-season--solitude and an unprecedented closeness to and awareness of the elements, a barely electrified dwelling that's not "on the phone," stoic donkeys and an abundance of mostly nameless cats, the unspeakable beauty of her surroundings. Contrary to the expectations of her unknown masters, Patricia is writing about her experience in Ireland, an account that turns out to be more personal than art historical, as was her original intent. Her journal, the notebook she hides behind a secret panel in the cottage, is the text of The Music Lesson. From it we learn of the life Patricia has put on hold in New York and of the personal tragedy that has left her numbed for several years, and we are told of the family history and the subtle indoctrination that have culminated in her current situation.

Katharine Weber's The Music Lesson is an elegant little novel about loyalty and loss and disillusionment. Its protagonist is not always empathetic--Patricia crosses a line, foolishly and devastagingly, perhaps not quite believably, when she follows Mickey's lead--but she regains our support in the tense but quiet action of the book's end. As with her first book, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, Weber's sophomore effort proves that she is an author worth watching.