Published: May 01. 2010 2:00AM

Reviewed by Ashley Warlick
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

An Unfinished Score

By Elise Blackwell

Elise Blackwell’s fourth novel, “An Unfinished Score,” begins in a devastating moment: Suzanne hears on the news, while making dinner for her family, that her lover’s plane has crashed and there are no survivors. She instantly divides, trading her illicit interior life of passion for that of grief, all the while struggling to seem on the surface as though nothing has changed. For this, she has quite an audience: Suzanne lives with her husband, Ben; her best friend and string quartet partner, Petra; and Petra’s daughter, Adele, who is deaf.

Deafness and its alternate reality, the exchanges of intensity with which we balance our losses, are strong themes running through this novel. Suzanne’s necessary silence about her affair deepens her memories of what she shared with Alex: their hotel rooms and passionate trysts, their similar discordant childhoods, their long talks about music. The novel itself is centered on music, its lore and performance and creation. Suzanne is a violist in a quartet primarily concerned with playing music for a living. Ben is a composer, teaching at Princeton, with a cool and superior aesthetic. Alex was a conductor; that’s how he and Suzanne met and first connected. He was secretly writing a score for the viola.

This score comes to light shortly after Alex’s death, when Suzanne’s cell phone begins ringing with his home number. Alex’s wife, Olivia, wants to meet. When Suzanne flies to Chicago, she is struck by Olivia’s composure, her statuesque beauty; when she tells her she’s not what she expected, Olivia says, “It’s funny you should say so, because you are precisely what I expected.” What a wife or a husband knows without being told is part of this larger conversation too, and Blackwell offers unsettling, tangible insight into the inner workings of these flawed but functioning marriages and their intensifying secrets. Olivia wants Suzanne to bear the torment of completing Alex’s score for debut. Ben is also composing, a piece of music written with unexpected tenderness for Suzanne. Suzanne stretches herself thin between the two worlds. The novel’s crescendo builds as revelations from all sides slowly come to light, bridging some gaps and creating new ones. As a result, “An Unfinished Score” becomes an elegant and thoughtful story about passion and absence, light and dark, the balance necessary to live a life that makes art.