Women's Fiction, Irish Americans - Fiction & Literature, Crimes - Fiction, Multicultural Detectives - Fiction

The Music Lesson, The

Name: The Music Lesson, The
Author: Katharine Weber
ISBN: 9780609603178

by Katharine Weber

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Overview

"She's beautiful," writes Irish-American art historian Patricia Dolan in the first of the journal entries that form The Music Lesson. "I look at my face in the mirror and it seems far away, less real than hers." The woman she describes is the subject of the stolen Vermeer of the novel's title. Patricia is alone with this exquisite painting in a remote Irish cottage by the sea. How she arrived in such an unlikely circumstance is one part of the story Patricia tells us: about her father, a policeman who raised her to believe deeply in the cause of a united Ireland; the art history career that has sustained her since the numbing loss of her daughter; and the arrival of Mickey O'Driscoll, her dangerously charming, young Irish cousin, which has led to her involvement in this high-stakes crime. How her sublime vigil becomes a tale of loss, regret, and transformation is the rest of her story. As Patricia immerses herself in the turbulent passions of her Irish heritage and ponders her aesthetic fidelity to the serene and understated pleasures of Dutch art, she discovers, in her silent communion, a growing awareness of all that has been hidden beneath the surface of her own life. And she discovers that she possesses the knowledge of what she must do to preserve the things she values most.

About the Author, Katharine Weber

Katharine Weber lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two daughters and spends part of the year in West Cork, Ireland. She teaches fiction writing at Yale University.

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Editorials

Mary Flanagan

The Music Lesson is more a sketch than painting, a romance rather than a thriller. -- Literary Review

In the slender follow-up to her much acclaimed Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, Weber ambitiously tackles a variety of weighty issues: the subjective nature of art, politics in Northern Ireland and the intense grief felt over the loss of a child. But these themes are merely the backdrop for an engaging, at times suspenseful tale of an international art heist and ill-fated love affair. Patricia Dolan, a 41-year-old art historian at the Frick Museum in New York, unexpectedly meets her distant young Irish cousin Michael O'Driscoll for the first time. Emotionally deadened by the death of her young daughter and the demise of her marriage, she welcomes the rush of desire and emotion Michael inspires in her. Patricia's journal entries, which make up the novel, describe the passionate affair that ensues between the cousins, the intricate, politically motivated plan to steal a masterpiece by Vermeer that arises during their involvement and her solitary exile with the priceless painting in a turf-heated cottage nestled on the coast of Ireland. Weber evocatively details her narrator's world of oppressively rainy weather and nosy neighbors, and delivers convincingly the anxious and thoughtful musings of Patricia, as she waits for her lover and instructions. But Weber also realizes that even literary thrillers need to thrill, and the novel's swift, surprising conclusion is perhaps Weber's most satisfying achievement.— Mimi O'Connor