Theatre of the absurd

Some novels gaze and report and argue: others just sing. There are some writers who love and respect the visual arts, and want to bring them into prose — Henry James is one. A work freezes into an act of contemplation and description, as in the Bronzino set piece in The Wings of the Dove. And there are novelists who have a fascination with music, whose prose moves dynamically in response to musical form and sound.

These writers can have set pieces, too, like the performance of Beethoven’s Fifth in Howards End, but can also pattern their work in imitation of another art form that moves through time, has climaxes and a crescendo.  Joyce, a knowledgeable musician and competent tenor, wrote a very detailed fugue as a chapter in Ulysses, and another good tenor, Vikram Seth, wrote a lovely book around a string quintet in An Equal Music.

Telegraph Avenue is a wonderful novel of song and sound, in love with its art form, but also with many qualities of evanescence and improvisation, of cadenza and response. It is like a performance of which one says, ‘Oh, you should have been there’; and happily, there it is.

Michael Chabon is an American writer of immense charm and warmth, but also of really extraordinary powers of invention and wit. His major novels — The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union — construct worlds with exemplary solidity and bravura, and embark on journeys where you never quite know what will come next. When a drag queen called Miss Sloviak and her tuba impinge on the narrator’s stoned life in Wonder Boys, it is only the opening gambit — ‘The tuba? Keep it. It suits you.’

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a pitch-perfect Chandleresque thriller, set in an alternate world where the Jewish national home was granted to them for 60 years in Alaska, climaxes with a thrilling scene in which the hero, chained to an iron bed, is chased through the snow by Hasidic gangsters.