I wish that I liked Matthew Gallaway’s new novel better. The Metropolis Case is imaginative — to a fault, but that’s not what put me off — intelligent, and often enormously moving. The characters are fully realized and quite likeable — even the difficult Maria Sheehan, who sings like a goddess but who has a punk mouth on her. The novel’s areas of interest, so to speak, are opera (with a major in Wagner) and New York City — what’s not to love. The plot ingeniously weaves together narrative and symbolic strands from several masterpieces of the lyric stage, and it delivers, in its way, on its title reference, which is to an opera by Leos Janaček, Več Makropulos (The Makropulos Case). I am not going to unpack any of these references; it’s enough to say that Gallaway handles them sensitively. He knows what he is doing.

If only, I wished, he knew how he was writing. Well, no doubt he did and does. But his choice of tone was both grating and disappointing. The richly brooding quality of his stories called to mind some of the greatest contemporary writers, Joseph O’Neill, Andrew Holleran, and Colm Tóibín. This is a book that fearlessly confronts the tragic side of love — the loss of it, the impossibility of it — on both the parental and companionate scales. Like Darren Aronofksy’s Black Swan, The Metropolis Case recreates and re-imagines works that its characters are engaged in performing. The dark moments in the book are well-composed; they wouldn’t be moving, otherwise. It’s what fills up the book in between those moments that’s annoying and mistaken. Instead of fixing on a tone of suggestive restraint, Gallaway is prodigal with scenic details, and his default setting is “novel of manners.” This essentially comic voice is what grates. It’s not that the book is funny; it’s not (although there are a few good laughs). But it is very much a novel of daylight. In a book that breathes the heavy aura of Tristan und Isolde, daylight is the last thing that’s wanted.

About two thirds of the way through, I imagined a frightful conversation between the author and some of his friends, in which they cautioned him that a book about opera that takes place partly in Nineteenth Century Paris and Vienna would be lacking in hanger appeal. Maybe nobody mentioned another opera, Hansel and Gretel, but that’s what I thought of: like the witch, Gallaway compensated for the récherché nature of his material by piling on loads of name checks, related with a chatty-Cathy determination to put the reader in the picture.

Having addressed the needs of his new charge, Martin sliced himself two pieces of French sourdough; on one he spread his favorite Pierre Robert Camembert and on the other placed several slices of prosciutto di Parma and a sweet sopressata. These he took back to his study, along with a bottle of Shiraz he cradled in the nook of his elbow; a large wineglass, and an opener he carried in the fingers of his left hand, which in the course of the past hour or so had again started to ache. Dante, apparently full — although he did not say so, to Martin’s slight disappointment — sat quietly on the corner of the rug. “Good job,” he patenrally addressed the cat, who looked through him with an utter lack of acknowledgment that Martin did not fail to appreciate, for it seemed to reinforce his expectation that dante was not the sort who planned to run around breaking things, or even needed to be told otherwise.

I’d have preferred to jump into Gallaway’s imaginative brick oven without such enticements. Dante, the cat in the foregoing paragraph, is soon joined by Beatrice, whose eventual death is lovingly, almost climactically, retold at the end. (It could not be clearer that this is a passage taken straight from the life.) The fact that Beatrice meets her sad end at the Animal Medical Center, a facility a few blocks south of where I receive quarterly infusions of Remicade, did not exactly conduce to a transfiguring literary experience. But that’s just me.

The worst thing about such a profusion of details is that one or two inevitably clatter to the floor and break — because they’re wrong. In a comedy, who cares? On a walk with love and death such as this book takes us on, the racket is jarring. The first accident that I noticed occured on page 33, where we’re told that Lucien Marchand’s father has been “awarded a life tenancy for providing the beleaguered emperor with a cure for what in polite society was called la condition infernale…” The problem is that this entry is dated — each chapter begins with a date-stamp — Paris, 1846. To the best of my knowledge, there was only one emperor on earth at that time, Asian potentates and the Tsar aside, and, living in Vienna as he did, the Kaiser was unlikely to have the gift of life tenancies on the Ile St-Louis. Louis Napoleon would not preside over the Second Empire for a few years yet. This error could have been fixed at a stroke; France had a king at the time, and kings are no less familiar with impotence than emperors. If you’re going to name a monarch, you’d better name him correctly. The last error that I caught was even sloppier: Lucien addressed his first male lover, in his death-throes, as “mon chère.”

I hate coming away from a book disappointed; I feel that I haven’t done it justice. I can at least say that wishing that I’d like it more is honest: I did like it, often very much. More and more as it went on — as it went on, the narrative got thicker and richer. But oh, I wish that Matthew Gallaway had trusted more in what Tristan and Isolde have to say about Nacht and Tag.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.