Notes of Longing

Few moments in life are as clear as those experienced in youth. When Martin Dijksterhuis climbs the water tower of the Potter Featherbone Co. in Appleton, Wis., with his girlfriend, Corinna Williams, the world is all before them: the homes of his family and relatives, the lights of the football field where the homecoming game is being played, the distant chapel and cemetery, the apple orchards that his father and uncle own, the woods and, far beyond, the place where, according to Indian legend, the creator held the Earth when he shaped the world.

It’s an image of Paradise, 1955, from which Marty and Cory will soon be expelled, for in the exultation of the hour, an instant born of youthful confidence, love and defiance, they lose themselves in themselves.

“What do you want to do?” Marty asks.

“I want you to kiss me again.”

Which he does, and before the night is over, Cory is pregnant, and what was once so suddenly clear is forever obscured.

Writing with the same sensitivity to the twists and turns of life as he did in “The Sixteen Pleasures” and “The Fall of a Sparrow,” Robert Hellenga turns the hard truths of his latest novel, “Blues Lessons,” upon this singular scene.

“Embracing Corinna, that night after climbing the water tower, I’d been embracing life itself. We made love only once, but once was enough, and maybe that’s why this memory was fixed so cleanly in my mind: because it was uncontaminated by additional experiences. Even as my mother was speaking to me I evoked the image of the little town seen from above, like a tiny town that I was seeing for the first time ... and for a few minutes we’re weightless, as if we’ve both let go of the ladder at the same time and are floating upward through empty space, as if we’re being gathered up into the night sky like a new constellation.”

Covering 20 years, from 1954 to 1974, “Blues Lessons” is a love story born of the implications of that moment, where first innocence then prejudice sharply collide.

For the bitterest outcome of that evening’s escapade is not that Cory becomes pregnant but that she and her parents will soon be paid by Marty’s mother and father to leave Appleton and never come back. Not only does Cory threaten Marty’s future, but she is black, two facts that strain the limits of tolerance in this small community.

It is a quick sequence--beginning with the childhood the young lovers share, the classes they take reading Camus and Ayn Rand, their courtship and late-night forays into the picking camps where they listen to the migrant orchard workers pound out the most desperate love songs--that unto itself is an exquisite novella, comparable in its subtle renderings of privilege and race to the best of Reynolds Price.

Only Hellenga soon widens the aperture. Wounded by his parents, Marty repudiates their lives. Given the option of playing the straight notes in life, he mercilessly bends them. Quitting school (his mother had always dreamed he would go to college), fleeing the orchards (where his family has a major stake), he joins the Navy, returns home to work for the railroad post office and chases his dream to learn the blues into the jook joints of Chicago’s South Side.

Hellenga brings a lot into these pages--the horticulture of apples, the blues, principles of mathematical integration and bowling--and he pulls it off, bringing the requisite depth of emotion to each moment, letting the evanescence of youth pale beside the dreams and regrets of adulthood. It is, of course, the music--the chords and the songs Marty practices--that carries the story ahead, away from Appleton and into a broader world. The blues, Marty discovers, is “a painful longing ... a longing that was better than having,” but it doesn’t keep him from wanting. In his obsession--dogged and driven, as the great bluesman Robert Johnson once sang--he hires a private detective to find Cory, now living in Madison, Wis. She works in a beauty salon. Their daughter is 8 years old, and the civil rights movement is irrevocably redefining life in this country.

If the future of American fiction is--as some have argued--to point us to a deeper understanding about the issues of race and ethnicity that link and divide us, “Blues Lessons” is an important novel, a historical document of sorts, reminding us of who we were before we got here today. Lost, in love, faithful and naive, Marty is never far from that moment on the water tower or the perplexing uncertainty over whether the color of his skin--or Cory’s--really matters.

Yet in their conversations, Cory has the upper hand. Knowing more about Marty’s assumptions and attitudes than even he does, she exhibits the irony that James Baldwin, among others, knew so well when he wrote, “by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is.” It is her awareness and their shared history that deftly complicate their relationship and, perhaps more interesting, the relationship between Marty and his daughter, so that what began as a story about race evolves into a story about identity.

Who are we? Who is Cory, a black woman attempting to connect to herself through a beauty salon that specializes in Afros? Who is Marty, a white man playing the blues in the style of Mike Bloomfield? And who is Cozy, their mixed-race child? Identity, as Hellenga sees it, runs in proportion to the sympathy and rebellion one feels toward one’s parents.

Was Appleton the Garden of Eden? Is any childhood perfect? Toward the end of the story, Hellenga brings the saddest realization to Marty’s mother, the woman who drove herself between her son and his life, a parent who, in spite of best wishes and intent, broke the dreams of her child. “I wanted you to be happy, and I made you unhappy. I made myself unhappy,” she says to him in a moment of rapprochement. But she is, of course, unnecessarily hard on herself. No one--not a parent, a lover or a child--can ease the longing in another’s soul. That’s, after all, the reason for the blues.

“Do you remember,” Marty asks Cory late in the novel, “how my mother used to talk about a line of poetry, or a whole poem, greeting your spirit? Like that line about the tears of things, lacrimae rerum. That’s what the blues gives us ... the tears of things. The joys of things too.”

There’s no better description for Hellenga’s achievement in this intelligent, deeply satisfying story.

*

Thomas Curwen is the deputy editor of Book Review.