The Music Teacher

I just finished reading The Music Teacher, the terrific new book by Barbara Hall, who's written a number of novels (several of them young adult titles) but is best known as the creator of Joan of Arcadia and Judging Amy. She was also a regular contributor to I'll Fly Away and Northern Exposure. So it's no surprise that the book is peppered with biting bon mots about California in general and Los Angeles in particular (where "you're exposed to yoga against your will. It's everywhere, like smog."), the kind that only someone who's lived and worked in that particular paradise/hell could deliver convincingly.

But if you didn't know her CV, you'd guess from The Music Teacher that she's a musician first and a writer second, and you might be right. She's a helluva singer and has a pretty fine band (The Enablers), and she writes about music like, well, only someone who's lived and worked in that particular paradise/hell can do.

Full disclosure: I know Barbara a little bit through an email list I'm on and a group blog, Holler If Ya Hear Me, that we both write for -- here's some of her stuff. So I've had the pleasure of reading Barbara's more casual writing, where she's always witty and insightful and big-hearted in the kind of seemingly effortless way that you adore and are insanely jealous of at the same time. The Music Teacher has all of that going on and then some.

It's the story of Pearl Swain, a frustrated coulda-been-a-contender violinist who teaches lessons at an L.A. music store called McCoy's, and her relationship with Hallie, the kind of natural musician that comes along only once in a lifetime. We see Pearl see herself in Hallie, see the potential that she herself once had before she sacrificed music for marriage, and we see Pearl slowly invest too much of herself in her student. Sure, the notion of a teacher living vicariously through her student is nothing new, but Hall writes both Pearl and Hallie with such empathy and insight that she breathes new life into stock characters—they're both irresistably likable because they're flawed and tragic and wonderful in the very real ways that we're all flawed and tragic and wonderful.

The cast of secondary characters that surround Pearl—the rest of the crew at McCoy's—are equally well-drawn; the back-cover blurb from Brock Clarke (author of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England) says the book "does to, and with, music teachers what Nick Hornby's High Fidelity does to, and with, record store geeks," and he's right. Anyone who's hung around musicians will instantly recognize Franklin, Patrick, Ernest, and Clive and their self-justifying takes on what "real" music and "real" musicians are.

And, as we watch Pearl make her way among all of them, and finally come to some degree of acceptance of her strengths and shortcomings, we learn a whole lot about how to accept our own. In other words, it does exactly what the best music does.