The Music Room (Includes Advance Reading Copy)

Separated from his wife and troubled by his brother's recent suicide, Martin Lambert tries to search his childhood memories for clues to the path his life has taken

McFarland extracts sweetly sad, haunting music from a family's dysfunction in this debut novel. Cellist Martin Lambert owns a San Francisco record company. His wife Madeline is divorcing him for another man, and his brother Perry, a composer, has just committed suicide in New York. Flying there to dig out the reasons for Perry's death, Martin falls in love with his brother's pregnant ex-girlfriend, Jane Owlcaster, a choral conductor. Their affair is a mutual strategy to block the process of grieving. Through flashbacks, dream transcripts and trips to the family's Virginia estate, we meet Martin's alcoholic, widowed mother, who for years served as an "enabler" for another compulsive drinker: Martin's father, a failed concert pianist. Memories are exorcised--the day the house nearly burned down, father drinking himself to death, skeletons in the family closet. Martin's first-person quest to reorder his own drifting life at times slips into preciosity, but overall the musical, highly nuanced prose carries the story. First serial to the New Yorker ; film rights to Guber-Peters.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A brother's death leads a man toward self-discovery in this sensitive and polished first novel. Marty Lambert, a San Francisco record company executive, is facing an impending divorce when his younger brother Perry, a talented com poser, commits suicide in New York. Mystified by his brother's death, Marty goes to New York to seek an explanation, following an elusive trail of clues that leads from his brother's friends to the troubled history of his wealthy Virginia family. In the end he learns as much about himself as Perry, coming to terms with a legacy of alcoholism. He pulls himself from the brink of destruction to acceptance and, ultimately, a de gree of redemption, carrying on his brother's unfinished work. A painful, haunting tale told with uncommon skill, The Music Room is a most impressive debut.
- Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P . L. , Mass.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.