THE WONDER SINGER
George Rabasa
Unbridled Books
Literary Fiction
ISBN: 9781932961690
Mark Lockwood is a hack, a writer-for-hire whose bread and butter so far has been a series of How to Talk To Your Teen About... books. So when he takes on ghostwriting the autobiography of aging opera diva Mercè Casals, he finds himself entranced by her free spirit and her stories. It doesn’t hurt that “La Casals” employs an attractive, no-nonsense day nurse named Perla, who tolerates his flirting in between caring for her charge and sneaking out for smoke breaks. He spends his days in the Señora’s apartment, learning to appreciate opera and recording 500 hours of interviews, somewhat at the expense of his marriage to Claire, which was already suffering.
But one morning, Perla urgently calls him into Casals’s bathroom. “In the dim light, in the steamy warm air, in the scent of the orchids and the ferns and the snaking tendrils of ivy and clematis and jasmine, Lockwood hears himself think: My diva is dead.” Soon his agent, Hollywood Hank, is hounding Lockwood for the tapes. Now that Casals has died, he wants to replace Lockwood with a different hack --- a famous one. And when he spies Alonzo Baylor at the funeral, his worst suspicions are confirmed: “Baylor makes literature look easy, as one terse sentence inevitably builds on another. He has time to write books and to pal around with film stars, prizefighters, beach bunnies, and ex-convicts.”
Lockwood, somewhat to his own surprise, digs in his heels. He jealously guards the tapes and plunges into finishing The Wonder Singer, a book that will not only beat Baylor to the punch, but also do justice to the story of the eccentric diva that has opened up his own life. George Rabasa’s novel is the story of Lockwood’s struggle with this book, interspersed with chapters of the actual book he is writing, in Casals’s own (we presume edited) words. Beginning with an early abandonment by her father, a tutelage of “the voice” under a father figure, teenage adventures in the Barcelona of the Spanish Civil War, her life unfolds with stories of the men and opera roles she has known throughout a long and colorful career.
Case in point. She is married to tenor Nolan Keefe, but a certain prince is wooing her. His amorous gift? Two peacocks let loose on stage. Casals relates the tale in one of her chapters: “The magnificent birds strutted in as I was rising from a languid curtsy.” (Illustrating one problem of the ghostwriter: can we imagine someone describing her own curtsy as languid?) Back in the hotel room with her husband, the birds trash the room when the couple begins to get “intimate.”
THE WONDER SINGER presents many colorful threads that are never resolved. How does the completed book do in the wide world? Does it beat out Baylor’s version? Do Claire and Lockwood reconcile? How is Lockwood changed by persevering with The Wonder Singer? Certainly this book contains all the exotic images and lurid stories that one might expect from a novel about an opera diva. As it zigzagged back and forth between chapters of The Wonder Singer and details of Lockwood writing the autobiography (pizza boxes piling up and overflowing ashtrays, odd alliances, Claire leaving), I couldn’t help wishing for a tidy bow in at least a couple of the loose ends. But perhaps the unanswered questions lend staying power to the vivid scenes of this book, like a few tantalizing secrets keep a great singer’s reputation alive long after she leaves the stage.
--- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman Nicol
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