The opening paragraphs of The Changing of Keys by Connecticut writer Carolyn Jack not only sets the tone of detachment in this unusual first-person novel, they also show that its author is in command of a narrative style that arouses curiosity and unease at the same time. The speaker, a 14-year-old piano prodigy named Simon, born in England, now living with his mother on a small Caribbean island, is unemotionally describing the conditions that affect his life: the extreme wet and dry seasons and more so the extreme aloofness and dominating, autocratic behavior of “Mother,” a God obsessed, almost deaf widow, who drives her son’s career with never a display of affection. She is unable to say the word “love”. “God will understand,” she says. Her son does not.
“Her look could chemically alter bone marrow,” he says. Between her gaze indoors and God’s eye outside, Simon feels “more and more like a lab creature in mid-dissection, held fast by two pins.” His father is dead, drowned when Simon was eight. An extremely talented musician whose passion was singing opera, he never got a chance to pursue it once he married Simon’s pregnant mother.
“Mother” was determined that Simon be a prodigy and he adds he obliged her by becoming one. In the process, however, he becomes unfeeling, estranged from and contemptuous of everyone, arrogant, especially to his tutors because he knows, and they know, he’s better than they are. Dismissive, defensive, he can be provocatively cruel. And yet, the reader feels sympathy for him. After all, he’s a child. Starved for and finally hardened against compassion.
His mother’s response, when he confronts her, is: “what are hugs and kisses when God has given you genius? . . . it’s a sin to waste genius.”
And so she ships him off to Juilliard. And then, after studying piano for a while, he commits a horrific sin, according to Mother, who will never speak or write to him again until he visits her on her deathbed years later. He leaves piano for singing, his superb tenor bringing him worldwide acclaim.
Performing on the piano, he reflects, was something he “mastered and wielded, a weapon.” But when he sang, HE was the thing he played.” He stood “stripped of all anger and contempt, unprotected, wanting only to hear my own voice and know that others heard and were moved.”
He basks in fame but becomes known as difficult to work with. Along the way, however, he falls for a soprano, also gifted, attracted by her talent but also her sharp wit, humor, intelligence. They go their separate professional ways – his call - but later reunite in an opera, and without quite knowing why, on a visit with her to Wales, where his father was born, he asks her to marry him.
Though she loves him, she worries that competitive sparks will fly, that he’ll lose his temper. But she’s pregnant. “One thing is true about classical singers who marry,” she muses, “they care too much about their voices to scream at each other.”
It’s a nice but failed attempt to counter the hostility Simon cannot suppress and that drives his destructive, alienating behavior.
The book jacket of The Changing of Keys says nothing about Caroly Jack’s knowledge of classical music, but part of the story’s attraction has to do with her impressive immersion in that world and capturing the tense world of top performers when love of profession is threatened by personal dysfunction.
