A triangle of lovers of music, words

The place is San Francisco, the year 1962. Jake Roseman, a liberal celebrity at the top of his game -- “[y]ou know, the attorney who’s creating all the fuss with the colored” -- might be a Jewish Jack Kennedy, with his boyish charm and philandering energy. Sylvia Bran is by comparison a nobody, less a doer and more a wily watcher (she prefers the term “voyant”), a 29-year-old reeling from her mother’s recent suicide who has come to start a new life in the city and finds work playing demo show tunes in a piano store.

Although Sylvia and Jake form two sides of the classic love triangle at the center of Bart Schneider’s passionate new novel, “Beautiful Inez,” they don’t know each other. In fact, their separate worlds touch only once, toward the book’s end, and even then they remain essentially strangers, thanks to Sylvia’s facility at concocting fake identities for herself. Nonetheless, the two share a deep connection, of both body and soul. For Jake is the husband of Inez Roseman, stunning first violinist with the symphony, a prodigiously gifted musician who has renounced a solo career in favor of her husband and two children. And in this 20th anniversary year of the couple’s perfect-from-the-outside marriage, Sylvia -- interloper, liar, liberator -- succeeds in seducing the cool, blond musician: She becomes the lover of beautiful Inez.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words for a concerto? Or a movement by Mendelssohn? None, of course. Or maybe an infinity -- the point being that music and writing don’t seem to mix. Writers can be painters, or vice versa, and musicians are said to kick back by solving quadratic equations. But musicians who write, or writers who can articulate the mysteries of music, are rare. And in demand.

As evidenced by Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata” and Ann Patchett’s “Bel Canto,” there’s a trail of more or less successful attempts to wed the Venus of music to the Mars of language. Schneider respects the challenge: Not for nothing is his Sylvia a language freak, a mental acrobat of free association. After first caressing the mesmerized Inez, she muses: “Attraction. Infatuation. Intrigue. Obsession.... Bathophobia: the fear not of hygiene, but of depths. Gymnophobia: the fear not of gym class but of nudity.... Sylvia turns over each word like a flavored lozenge in her mouth.” Who better than this adoring yet acute observer to interpret her lover’s music, to make great music nearly ring from the page, frightening in its power to delight, to illumine, to devastate the soul?

“Beautiful Inez” aims for virtuosity. Before turning to the usual acknowledgments, the author’s note starts with a disarming statement: “This was a very difficult novel to write.” One is left to guess which aspect he found most difficult. Was it the ‘60s setting, dutifully researched but at times stiff as a wax-figure exhibit, despite the Cuban missile crisis fizzling away portentously in the background? Was it the delicate task of graphically depicting sex between two women? (Here he shows astonishing empathy.) Was it finding a fresh and vivid approach to the intuited connection between artistic flowering and madness -- the deal with the devil?

Or did Schneider struggle most to craft a narrative sustained by major themes and their interplay, and by its characters, but not strapped together by the mechanical revelations of plot? In this novel, suspense derives from a single decision hanging in the air, unobtrusive at first but growing more urgent day by day and with Inez’s sexual awakening: Which way will she finally choose to turn? The compass pulls hard one way and then another. For all that’s been revealed of Inez’s history, her appetites and ambivalences (“She had a beautiful baby she could barely stand to hold in her arms. At least her own mother had the good sense to die in childbirth”) she remains opaque at the core -- an enigma not only to the reader, but to Jake and Sylvia as well. In the tension of the final chapters one is tempted to accuse the author of crass manipulation -- (“Inez is your character, you know where she’s headed, don’t keep us holding our breath”) -- until the realization hits that the creator of “Beautiful Inez” must have been holding his breath too as he wrote, as he followed her into her unforeseeable future, praying for her salvation.

Kai Maristed is the author of the novels “Broken Ground,” “Out After Dark” and “Fall.”

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Beautiful Inez

A Novel

Bart Schneider

Shaye Areheart Books: 354 pp., $24