Matthew Gallaway’s big-hearted, overstuffed first novel The Metropolis Case
opens with a long email from 2003 which discusses the opera at the core of its four storylines, Tristan and Isolde, with the same infectious, digression-packed exuberance of his blog posts at The Gay Recluse. His protagonist Martin writes
“My own theory (by which I mean I may or may not have also read this somewhere) is that Tristan contains the seeds of modern “abstraction” and “psychology” that ultimately defined so much of the twentieth century, i.e., it’s no accident that in the wake of Tristan (1865) you have impressionism (Elstir!), cubism, Duchamp (specifically Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2), Freud and Jung and V.Woolf and Einstein (that’s for you, Professor Vallence), and eventually, I don’t know, the Smiths?”
Starting in 1960 with Anna Prus, an understudy opera singer at the Met who becomes a sensation replacing the star as Isolde, Gallaway weaves back and forth through time to tell three other stories: Lucien, a young gay opera singer in Paris in the 1860s who wants to premiere Wagner’s Tristan and whose scientist father works to create an elixir for extreme longevity. Martin, a single gay New York lawyer whose 41st birthday is 9/11 and whose adoptive parents died in a car crash. And Maria, a Pittsburgh opera student who gets to study with Anna at Julliard in 1978 and whose adoptive parents were killed in a house fire.
After 360 pages, the four strands are stretched and braided together in the concluding chapter 45 called “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” A major chord of the novel is exploiting life’s emotion for artistic expression and the chapter titles are appropriations of incongruous but fitting other titles. Using the Smiths’ song at the end is clever for about ten reasons, chief among them: it answers that initial question about T. and I.’s legacy; it’s counterintuitive as the standard image for endings is ‘lights out;’ the song’s lyrics play against the book’s action; and the title reinforces the opera’s struggle of the “unceasing torment and longing (represented by ‘the day’ or more broadly ‘life’), not just for each other but for a more permanent form of relief (otherwise known as ‘the night’ or ‘death’).” That struggle underscores the book’s many parental deaths, a lover’s suicide, and Lucien’s father’s quest for eternal life. The closing chapter brings the action up to 2002, but the opening email is dated 2003, sending the reader back to the beginning, creating one more eternal loop.
Another light that never goes out, all too rare in literary fiction, is confronting the challenge of how to be gay in the predominantly straight world, emphasized here by the character’s decision to “keep it burning in a remote corner of his mind.” Walking among the ash-covered and living dead in the hours after the Twin Towers fell, Martin thinks:
“…in a way that had been far beyond him twenty years earlier, he could now appreciate the advantages being gay offered him, not only in terms of access to the infinite reserves of seriously attractive men in New York City—some percentage of whom could be counted on to return his interest—but also for allowing him to see the world through different eyes—his own—to find beauty that in the past he would have overlooked or ignored in the effort to appear different than he really was. As Martin considered this, he felt a spark of desire—though more abstract than physical, a form of optimism, really—that he knew would be difficult if not impossible to reconcile with everything he had just witnessed (both in the present and in his memories), not to mention the accompanying waves of shock and sadness that continued periodically to wash through him and make him weak in the knees as he headed north. However small or illogical, he knew it was there, and he did not want to question or—worst of all—malign it; instead he resolved to keep it burning in a remote corner of his mind, unexamined for the moment but somehow reassuring as he returned his attention to the more pressing problem of getting home.”
Understandably, some readers may wonder whether all the book’s energy is expended on the bravura complexities and intellectual arias; what hope remains for characters grounded in realism? Yes, the operatic prose sometimes overreaches: A fire kills Maria’s parents “whose souls had departed long before their bodies dissolved into the molten memories of their daughter’s childhood.” Or, on 9/11, “He knew that, just as it had done outside, a tower had given way in his soul; it had been there for him to behold but then shuddered and collapsed and now was gone, leaving an empty space marked by an intense but purposeful sorrow and a vague longing… that nevertheless resonated with a beauty he could only describe as defiant.” And it’s possible that a trade-off for maintaining a harmony of tone among stories across three time periods shortchanges the 19th century chapters of some of their authenticity. But Lucien’s emotional life is nearly as rich and rounded as those of the 20th and 21st century Maria and Martin, both brilliantly drawn. In every era characters are ravaged by self-doubt and uncertainty about their talents, anxious through the “torpor of waiting” to see if they have the elusive spark of a true artist, and impatient for the world to recognize it and reward them. If those same demons ever haunted Matthew Gallaway, he’s vanquished them with The Metropolis Case.
[
] by Neil Powell has not been degayed, and neither has Holt's jacket copy, which praises partner Peter Pears:
, where Britten and Pears spent three decades, three years of which are covered in Ronald Blythe's new book.
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