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I often think back to a discussion I once had with my colleague, Chronicle movie critic Mick Lasalle, about the artistic version of “two kinds of people” people — you know, the ones who delight in dividing folks into categories according to some affiliation that seems to be illuminating.
We talked about the differences between Lennon people and McCartney people. We talked about Tolstoy people and Dostoevsky people.
Then I thought, as I so often do, about Bach people and Handel people. But I didn’t say anything, because come on — there aren’t really any Handel people. According to any ordinary reckoning, Bach reigns supreme, and everyone else is an also-ran.
Hi, nice to meet you. I’m a Handel guy.
That doesn’t mean I have anything negative to say about J.S. Bach. I love and admire the beauty and assurance of his compositions. I marvel at the intricacy and mathematical precision of his counterpoint.
Yet if you place these two composers side by side — which in my opinion is an illuminating comparison to make — I consistently find myself drawn decisively in Handel’s direction. It isn’t just that I find his writing more vivacious and more arresting (although I do). Rather, it’s that I consider Handel a kindred spirit on such fundamental questions as “What is music for, anyway? What sorts of rewards do we seek from it?”
You could hardly ask for a more solidly engineered contrast than the one between these two giants of the Baroque. They were born in Germany just a month apart; both were steeped in the traditions of German music until Handel, as a young man, spent a defining few years in Italy, which put him on a different creative track.
Stylistically, their closest point of contact comes in vocal and choral music. If you stand a little way off, these bodies of work — Bach’s cantatas and liturgical pieces, Handel’s operas and oratorios — can sound superficially similar. They’re built primarily out of solo arias, connected by sparse and speechlike music known as recitative, and interspersed with music for chorus. In both cases, music is there to serve and illuminate a linguistic text, by illustrating turns of phrase and embodying expressive impulses in sound.
But zoom in even a little and the differences become clear and defining. Bach composed for the church, Handel for the theater. Bach’s music is designed to exalt God, Handel’s to explore the multiplicity of human experience. Bach’s music turns inward, Handel’s outward. Where Bach touches the soul, Handel celebrates the body. (Only one of them has anything to say about sex.)
Obviously, these are crude and reductive binaries. But they also get at something true about the two men — and help explain, I think, why they might appeal to different kinds of music lovers.
For anyone whose notion of Handel is shaped by “Messiah,” it may come as a surprise to learn how completely irreligious his music is. Handel was an opera composer first and last, and his preoccupations were those of human interaction in all its manifestations
Decide for yourself — listen to music by Handel and Bach at datebook.sfchronicle.com. — the basic mechanisms of love, sorrow, power, betrayal and desire.
When the political and artistic winds shifted halfway though his career in his adopted home of London, Handel dexterously abandoned Italian opera and adopted the Englishlanguage biblical oratorio instead. But the change was little more than a fig leaf. For all their Judeo-Christian trappings, the oratorios — yes, even “Messiah” — are still operas under a light disguise.
Bach also traffics in the world of emotions, but largely as they relate to the Lutheran lifestyle. The love he celebrates is the love for Jesus; similarly for faith and sorrow and the rest.
This doesn’t imply that the true meaning of this music isn’t accessible to non-Christians like myself — only that we come into Bach’s house as guests. And because Bach’s assumed audience is made up of his fellow Lutheran churchgoers, he doesn’t have to persuade anyone of the importance of what he’s doing.
Handel, on the other hand, had tickets to sell, and if there’s one thing that underlies the differences between these two composers, it is Handel’s essentially mercantile outlook. His economic well-being depended on satisfying public taste, and he wrote with the audience, not God, in mind. The extravagance of his vocal writing, the emotional entanglements of his opera plots, the emphasis on external display and musical virtuosity — it was all designed to bring in paying customers.
Bach’s music says, “Listen to how beautiful this is — won’t God be pleased?”
Handel’s music says, “Listen to how exciting this is! Are pleased?”
Indeed I am. I’m thrilled by the resourcefulness, the fecundity and the communicative directness of Handel’s writing, but most of all I’m thrilled by the fact that he regards my satisfaction — me, the listener — as the reason for music to exist.
This is by no means the only reason for artists to make art. Some try to create timeless monuments to dazzle posterity. Some find it an avenue for selfexpression, and some simply have an urge to tinker and invent stuff. I have no beef with any of these motivations.
But for me, it’s the impulse to bring joy to your fellow humans that resonates most strongly. That’s why I count myself among the Handel people, and why I feel confident I’m not alone.
Around this time last year, we all hoped 2021 would bring a COVID-free world and a less exasperating political atmosphere. Alas. We’re probably all a bit more jaded now, perhaps a little less convinced of New Year’s fresh starts, but there is always one thing we can reliably look forward to, no matter what else is happening: a new crop of great books. We’ve chosen nine coming out in the next six months — many from near-universally admired authors ( Jennifer Egan! Roddy Doyle!) and some from slightly lesser-known writers who should be universally admired. Happy new year! Let’s all resolve to read more good books in 2022.
IN FEBRUARY
Moon Witch Spider King
“Moon Witch Spider King” is the second book in the Dark Star trilogy, James’ “African Game of Thrones.” The first novel in the series, “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” was bought by actor and producer Michael B. Jordan. Have no fear if you haven’t read the first one, though. James intends his trilogy to be read in any order and is apparently excited for readers to start with this one. James counts Neil Gaiman and George R.R. Martin as fans. So readers are in very good company.
Life Without Children
Ireland may have dibs, but we get to claim Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle as our global treasure. Already out in Ireland and the United Kingdom, his new book of stories set during COVID is garnering breathless reviews like this one from the Sunday Times: “Roddy Doyle, the undisputed laureate of ordinary lives, has just delivered a quietly devastating collection of short stories that brilliantly portrays the pervasive sense of hopelessness that immobilized us during the dog days of Covid. … Doyle breaks our free fall into despair by emphasizing the redemptive power of humor, love and the kindness of strangers.” We’re in.
Circle Way: A Daughter’s Memoir, a Writer’s Journey Home
In this visually rich, lyrical book, the late Mary Ann Hogan reflects on a life of letters and her relationship to her late father, Bill Hogan, well-known literary editor at The Chronicle. “Circle Way” is a bittersweet memoir of a father, daughter and a prominent California family. At the heart of the story, journalist Mary Ann grapples with identity, family, terminal illness and the creative calling. Sifting through her father’s notebooks after his death, Mary Ann discovers a man whose unrealized dreams echo her own. This is a moving exploration of literature, family and history illustrated with Bill Hogan’s original sketches and watercolors.
IN MARCH
A Ballad of Love and Glory
Reyna Grande’s 2012 memoir, “The Distance Between Us,” has become a classic. As one of the most personal, harrowing and honest memoirs about crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without papers, it continues to resonate. Her new historical novel follows a Mexican army nurse and an Irish soldier who must fight, at first for their survival and then for their love, amid the atrocity of the Mexican-American War. It’s an impeccably researched and deeply felt story about a historical moment most people know little about.
IN APRIL
Take My Hand
Best-selling author of historical fiction (do yourself a favor and read “Wench” if you haven’t), Perkins-Valdez’s profoundly moving new novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients is inspired by true events. Celeste Ng writes, “‘Take My Hand’ is an unforgettable exploration of responsibility and redemption, the dangers of good intentions, and the folly of believing anyone can decide what’s best for another’s life.”
Sea of Tranquility
By Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf; 272 pages; $24)
There seems to be an emerging trend in contemporary fiction: stories that span decades, from the (sometimes ancient) past into the unknowable future. The new novel by award-winning, best-selling (and super prolific) author Emily St. John Mandel is one of them. It takes the reader from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon 500 years later. Yes, we follow her to the moon. Time travel in Mandel’s tender and intellectually playful hands proves transcendent.
The Candy House
They aren’t calling this a sequel to Egan’s best-seller “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (set in San Francisco), more of a sibling novel. Spanning decades, with an intricate plot and interconnected characters, “The Candy House” introduces us to a tech billionaire who ushers in a new age of enhanced digital sharing, the anthropologist who unwittingly enabled this new era, “eluders” who seek to retain privacy in the face of the onslaught and the “proxies” who impersonate them. It’s set in San Francisco, New York City, suburban country clubs, tech office cubicles, the desert and the mysterious nation of X, with entwined characters and plot points that overlap with “A Visit from the Goon Squad.”
IN MAY
2 A.M. in Little America
Brimming with mystery, suspense and Kalfus’ distinctive comic irony, “2 A.M. in Little America” poses several questions vital to the current moment: What happens when privilege is reversed? Who is watching and why? How do tribalized politics disrupt our ability to distinguish what is true and what is not? This is a story for our time — gripping, unsettling, prescient — by the novelist whom David Foster Wallace called “an important writer in every sense of ‘important.’”
By Allison Arieff
After reading a page or two of Hanya Yanagihara’s latest book, “To Paradise,” you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled into an Edith Wharton novel: “He had come into the habit, before dinner, of taking a walk around the park …”
But then you might pause when coming upon the description of that walker, David Bingham, as he’s shaking the hand of his brother John and of John’s husband and then kissing the cheek of his sister Eden, and her wife, Eliza.
It’s a little confusing until you realize — “Ah, this is a reimagined 19th century wherein people could marry whom they choose,” and so you continue reading, anticipating how society might look and feel different given this fundamental alteration to history.
But weirdly, apart from socially sanctioned same-sex relationships, it seems … not that different at all?
David falls in love in the agonizingly chaste manner of 19th century literary romances. And yes, he falls in love with a man, Edward, a music teacher who is charming, poor and possibly untrustworthy. Yanagihara normalizes their samesex relationship in an era when such a relationship was something to hide — but everything else is normal, too. The social mores of the time are as formal and repressed as ever, the divide between the haves and have-nots is as stark, and other races are tolerated but encouraged to leave to form their own communities. Meanwhile, war and colonization run rampant outside the bubble of the Free States, of which New York is a part.
To Paradise
Lots of hand-wringing ensues about the relationship, and then this first section of the three-part novel abruptly ends. We jump into Book II, called Lipo-Wao-Nahele, (which, in Hawaiian, translates to “the darkness and gloom of a thick forest”), where it’s 1993 and a young gay man, also named David, is, like Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, fretting about flowers for a party. This David is also in a relationship defined at least in part by an imbalance of wealth, but far more dire is the specter of AIDS that surrounds them. David has received a letter from his absent father, with whom he has a fraught relationship — a complex web of generational trauma related both to family secrets and the colonization of Hawaii. Yanagihara is a fourthgeneration resident of Hawaii and has explored its colonization in a previous book, “The People in the Trees,” making this the most personal of the three sections.
The book’s longest and final section, “Zone Eight,” presents a bleak and authoritarian version of New York City in 2093 through the eyes of Charlie, a female narrator who grieves for her grandfather and for a past that was. Yanigihara’s version of dystopia feels surprisingly familiar, given the current state of affairs in America, yet it feels like a pastiche of elements observed elsewhere (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Minority Report,” etc.)
Yanagihara has described “To Paradise,” which spans three centuries and three versions of the American experiment, as a counterfactual novel. In an interview in April, she expressed hope that “readers will see reflected in its pages some of the questions we’ve all been asking about this country’s premise, especially over the past four years.” It’s true that the themes explored in the book’s 700 pages are big ones — love, illness, power, wealth, racism. But what the author describes as a series of interconnected stories feels to this reader like three stand-alone (and not particularly compelling) novellas. I didn’t need all three narratives to be tied up neatly in a bow at the end, but I needed more of a connecting thread.
Fans of “A Little Life” (and there are so many!) will probably be disappointed. The quartet of friends, Willem, JB, Malcolm and Jude, felt like fully realized characters with real relationships (though their pain and trauma were almost too much to bear). For all the characters in her latest, the pursuit of paradise is elusive, as were my attempts to feel much empathy or interest for this multi-century group of Edwards, Davids and Johns. “Bad mother” books occupy their own capacious wing in the house of literature, with new rooms continually added. From Emma Bovary to Scarlett O’Hara to the bad mother (and father) of Tom Perrotta’s “Little Children,” we’re fascinated by parents who fail at their basic job of putting their children’s needs first.
In recent years, a different complaint has arisen: Do we judge parents, and especially mothers, by impossible standards? After all, who has the patience to be perfect all the time? As Lydia Kiesling, whose writing often investigates motherhood, recently wrote in a New York Times essay on mothers in films, there’s a need for stories that “make audible the scream rising in the throat.”
Armed with those questions comes “The School for Good Mothers,” a debut novel from Jessamine Chan. Frida Liu is the mother of 18-month-old Harriet. Overwhelmed by a recent divorce, Frida leaves Harriet alone to run an errand, leading to devastating consequences. The child is safe, but a judge orders Frida to attend a yearlong residential “program” where the lessons never veer from the drumming message: “I am a bad mother, but I am learning to be good.”
Like George Orwell’s “1984” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret
Atwood, the bureaucracy of state-sponsored re-education turns into dystopian nightmare. Readers who enjoy a darkly imagined alternate reality will appreciate the credible details. The school keeps its 200 women under constant surveillance and severely limits outside contact. To have a shot at regaining custody, they must practice flawless parenting with substitute children. Those children become a compelling part of the story as the mothers bond with them, perverse as that seems.
Ironically, the school treats the participants themselves as preschoolers, drilled in basics
The School for Good Mothers like hugging, sharing and angry outbursts. Chan depicts modern standards of good parenting as absurd and flags how those standards are inequitably applied depending on gender, race, culture and wealth. Deadpan observations accompany the blunt language (Frida’s ex-husband’s lover “is on a mission to nice her to death”), along with a resonating image of nested houses. Each mother is isolated in her grief, with moments of kindness providing some relief.
Though logical to the story, the lessons in motherhood become repetitive, crowding out a deeper exploration of the many characters’ lives. We get tantalizing glimpses of Frida’s own childhood and ask, how did her immigrant parents’ non-Western parenting shape Frida as an adult? This is never fully developed. The story darts from point to point, posing more inquiry than illumination. But the questions are timely in this age of strident morality, the upset and tedium of pandemic parenting and creepy surveillance.
Issues, more than characters, drive this novel, which is perhaps what the author intended: to unleash an audible scream, disturbing, unrelenting and, regarding Frida’s plight, ultimately moving.
Kathryn Ma’s new novel, “The Chinese Groove,” will be published in January 2023.