First Impressions
There's a piano in my library that I almost never play. It belonged to my husband's sister, who used to play it but no longer had room for it, so we took it into our home. Learning to play it was one of my lockdown resolutions, and like a lot of lockdown resolutions it didn't last. These days it mostly serves as a place to stack the prize books I'm meant to be reading. But learning to play properly has always been a long-term goal of mine, and Barbara Kingsolver's "Partita" has made me want to lift the lid and start practising again.
It also arrives with enormous expectations. This is Kingsolver's first novel since "Demon Copperhead", which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2023, and which I found enthralling and utterly convincing. "Partita" is a very different kind of book: quieter, more personal, and built around music. It took me a while to settle into it, but by the end I found it a moving and involving experience.
A Week of Preludes
Livia is a former piano prodigy who now teaches music in her rural hometown. One day she gets a phone call from Sigurd, the man she loved in college and hasn't spoken to in twenty-seven years. The present-day story covers the week before he comes to visit, while Livia clears out her late mother's hoarded house and relives the past, still haunted by her brother's suicide. It's a tightly contained story, with the past folded into Livia's present.
The novel is built like a piece of music. The present-day chapters are seven "Preludes", one for each day of the week. The past is told in dance movements (Allemande, Toccata, Sarabande, Fugue) until the pattern breaks with "Pathétique". The final two chapters are performance instructions, "Da Capo" (go back to the beginning) and "Al Fine" (play to the end). At one point Livia gives Sigurd the definition the whole book rests on: a partita "will never be all happy rondos, or all andantes in a minor key… The parts are all different, and the artist's work is to make them all add up to a something that feels whole."
I'll admit it took me a while to get there. We're plunged straight into Livia's predicament, and it took time, and a lot of backstory, before I understood the stakes. I trusted Kingsolver to guide me in, and as the story built I found myself gripped. When I finished, I went back and reread the opening section, and it had a much stronger resonance the second time. This is a novel that rewards going back to the beginning, which is exactly what its final chapters instruct.
A Novel with a Soundtrack
"Partita" offers something I rarely see in a novel: a playlist. A Listening List at the back of the book ties fourteen pieces to the pages where they're played, "so the reader may listen to it while reading." I can't listen to music while I'm reading, as I find even instrumental music too distracting, so instead I listened to each piece at the end of the chapter where it appears. It was poignant to hear how the music struck an emotional chord with what had just happened in the story. Several members of my book club said they wished they'd known about the list before they started, so if you're about to read it, take a look at the back first.
I don't play an instrument and know only a little about classical music, but I loved learning the stories behind the pieces. I especially loved Chopin's "Raindrop" Prelude, which is so eerie and beautiful. Kingsolver told the San Francisco Chronicle it's her own "broken-heart song, the one I always go and play when I'm sad." It reminded me of an interview I once heard with Joyce Carol Oates, who named the "Raindrop" as one of her favourite pieces and played the notes in the air while she listened to a recording.
What struck me most is how the mood of the music mirrors the ebb and flow of Livia's life. She can't confront or speak about her emotions directly, so they have to pass through the filter of music. That's part of what makes the novel so distinctive: we often learn how Livia feels from what she plays rather than from what she says.
Who Gets to Own Beauty?
One of the novel's biggest themes is the class divide in America, written by someone who knows Appalachia from the inside rather than through its stereotypes. I was moved by how frankly "Partita" presents Livia's money worries as a scholarship student from a low-income background: the government-surplus cheese, the work-study jobs, the three-dollar egg salad she orders at a diner out of loyalty to the staff. It's also sharp about how privilege makes people invisible to each other. Waitressing at Gorgo's, Livia serves her own biology lab partner, even says his name, and he never recognises her. But university also opens doors. The African singers at an anti-apartheid rally introduce her to a musical tradition that breaks every rule she learned in theory class, exactly the kind of discovery higher education can offer.
Livia and Sigurd's romance dramatises the divide. He has a theoretical commitment to equality, while she has the lived experience of a working-class upbringing, and his bright revolution is something she "never could find myself in." That gap in understanding feels like the root of the political divides so evident in the US today. Decades later Sigurd sees it himself, lamenting a country split into "the college-anointed versus the roofers and plumbers."
Kingsolver told the AP she wanted to ask "who made these rules, that small-town fiddlers and country music fans don't feel welcome in a symphony hall, and vice versa?" Livia's friend Mickie puts it most simply: "The point of art is to help you like your life better." The novel finds its own quiet answer to that question, which I won't spoil. Not everyone is persuaded by it. Sam Worley in Vulture thinks Kingsolver "asks the biggest questions she can, then resolves them in the smallest ways possible." Whether her answer feels political or like a retreat from politics is something I suspect each reader will settle differently.
Pathétique
Without giving too much away, a large part of the past storyline turns on a crisis in Livia's college years that brings her up against the realities of reproductive health care in autumn 1989, just after the Supreme Court's Webster ruling opened the door to state restrictions. It felt painfully relevant given the state of abortion law in the US now. Greg Londe in the Irish Times puts it best: "Kingsolver dramatises how reproductive rights are artists' rights." Fittingly, this is the one chapter named after a sonata rather than a dance.
This is also where the book piles on hardest. Livia endures a run of catastrophes that Londe calls "a Jude's worth of severe trauma", and one member of my book club asked, "How much bad stuff can happen to one person?!" For me this was one of the places where the novel felt less successful. The tragedies can feel as though they're put upon Livia to make a point, in a way some readers might find artificial.
Cyrus
One of the most poignant parts of the novel for me was the story of Livia's brother, Cyrus, whose backstory is revealed gradually. It's so tragic that he made the decision he did, and like Livia I kept wishing she could have stopped him. The clues are there early if you look. When there was talk of Cy enlisting, Livia remembers thinking, "do they know him? Cy wouldn't even watch war movies on TV." And the children gossip about Mr. Summits at the Western Auto, "called by some people 'a three-dollar bill,' which we thought had to do with the money in his cash register."
Over the course of the novel, Livia gradually learns more about what led Cy to his decision, and those revelations are some of the most gripping and painful moments in the book. I won't spoil them, but painful as they are, they at least end the not knowing, which must have been even worse.
Having gone through my own coming out as a teenager, I understand the pressure from parents to suppress who you are, and I realised that if things had worked out just a little differently, Cy's story could very well have been my own. I can see why he felt he had no options, even as I wish he'd held on to find a life with so many more possibilities. The novel sets beside him Livia's friends from music school, Bassoon and Percussion, who come back from Munich a couple, "with fortissimo marks where everything used to be pianissimo." Theirs is the happiness Cy didn't live to find. I find it so touching that Kingsolver puts gay characters at the heart of her novels. She told NPR that she has lost four people close to her to suicide, and in two cases was the last person to speak to them.
The Woman Without a Name
Livia's mother is never named, and neither is her grandmother. Her husband's will names "Willard Bohusz" but calls her only "his wife". When Livia finds her mother's old recital programmes ("in every one of these handbills she'd saved, my mother was listed as a soloist"), that would have been the natural place to say her name, but Livia withholds it. I think this is intentional, and I wonder whether it's Livia's way of controlling the narrative, denying her mother an identity outside the role she played in Livia's life. It made me think of an early line: "Home was no place I could have named anymore." Just as Livia can't name her origin, she won't name her mother.
As Livia clears the house, she uncovers more about her mother's own thwarted ambitions. Kingsolver told Oprah Daily she has "thought a lot about how it would have felt to be one of those mothers watching your daughter get to do things you never did." I understand that the hoarding was an illness, and that her own disappointments made her want her children to conform. But that didn't stop me feeling furious about the physical and psychological abuse and the loveless household she created, and about some of the choices Livia discovers she made. A member of my book club compared her to the mother in Arundhati Roy's memoir "Mother Mary Comes to Me", a connection I wish I'd made myself. So the almost ceremonial bonfire Livia builds felt poignant to me, a step towards letting go of anger and pain that can't be resolved.
Livia also recognises that she has inherited her mother's hoarding in emotional form. Her husband Charlie asks, "Livia, are you worried you're a keeper like her?" She admits the inside of her head is full of "berry baskets… Full of blame, guilt, things I said or didn't say," and Charlie replies, "No mice, then?" I debated whether this was Kingsolver over-explaining, but I believed it. From someone younger such self-insight might feel forced, but at Livia's stage of life, after a week of clearing the house and bracing for Sigurd, it felt natural.
Sigurd, Charlie and the Recital
Kingsolver told Oprah Daily that love "at 17… feels like breaking the speed limit. Many years later, it feels like a warm bath." That's Sigurd and Charlie in two sentences. Livia admits she'd "mistaken first-rate sex for love", and that even in bed with Charlie "it was Sigurd who pulled me over. Every time." Yet the night after the bonfire, when Charlie says he "grew up old" and calls his second chance at life "a blessing", may be the most intimate scene in the book.
Many readers struggle with Sigurd, and I can see why he's a character a lot of people won't like at all. But I felt more sympathetic towards him. He's young and idealistic, with a theoretical understanding of society that clashes with Livia's lived experience, and that idealism is so much a part of early adulthood. It seems natural that someone like him would fumble and fail to imagine the circumstances she was in. And it shows real growth that, decades later, he deliberately reaches out to make amends, giving her space to choose between talking on the phone and meeting in person.
I won't spoil how their reunion plays out, but when the novel builds up to it, it all seems to make sense, and there's a comic and poignant touch at the very end. Kingsolver describes "Partita" as a little love story, but to me it's much more about Livia coming to terms with herself, with the past, and with the life she has made. Her present circumstances aren't the ones she hoped for when she was younger, but she learns not just to accept her life as it has taken shape, but to love it. It may sound a bit corny, but it reminded me of RuPaul's line that “If you can't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”
A Few Reservations
Because everything is filtered through music, there are moments when the novel over-explains it. In one passage Livia spends a summer as a line cook: "Tomatoes cut like notes: half, quarter, eighth. Onions falling away from my knife in a glissando of even sixteenths." It read as corny to me, as if Kingsolver were overemphasising that everything Livia does is filtered through music, when chopping vegetables for a living is far more mundane. Malcolm Forbes in the Telegraph objected to the same "contrived musical references", and to Livia's "irksome tendency to explain to Sigurd, and by extension the reader" the workings of great music.
I also had some reservations about how it all played out, and not all of it was completely believable to me. Kingsolver told Inside Appalachia that after "The Overstory", her friend Richard Powers set out to write "a little fable", which became "Bewilderment", and she decided to do the same: "a little love story.… I don't think little is one of my skills." She didn't write a little story, but it isn't a sprawling one either. It sits somewhere in between. She also says that "every sentence in this book was rewritten between two and 40 times."
What the Critics and My Book Club Said
The reviews have been admiring but divided. Kirkus called it "brilliant, affecting work", Leigh Haber in the Boston Globe "sublime and sensual", and Jeff Giles in the New York Times "imperfect but deeply wrenching". Where critics agree is the pacing: the Guardian found it "slower to get going", and the Irish Times said it "drags in the middle". Sam Sacks in the Wall Street Journal thought the Dickensian catastrophes clash with the subtler psychology, but decided "the mismatch is intentional": like a partita, it's built from clashing parts. Heather Scott Partington in the LA Times read it as "Kingsolver on Kingsolver", even a rewriting of her earlier "Animal Dreams". It's easy to merge Livia with her author, who once won a piano scholarship herself and has spoken to NPR about her inherited Dupuytren's contracture, whose "goal… is to make your hands into fists". But Kingsolver is clear: "fundamentally, I am not Livia."
My book club was split too, and I think that says something interesting about the book itself. Several members loved it, especially the music and its perspective on the wisdom that comes with age, quoting Charlie's "I like being old. It's a blessing." Others felt very mixed, taking issue with the early relationship between Livia and Sigurd and the tragedies piled on top of Livia, while a few didn't connect with it at all. The surprising finding was that loving classical music didn't guarantee loving the novel, and having no musical background didn't stop people enjoying it. One member who used to play the piano described reading it as a homecoming. When I asked which Kingsolver novel was everyone's favourite, most people answered "The Poisonwood Bible", which I agree is fantastic and would like to reread, as I read it quite early in my life.
Verdict
I didn't love "Partita" quite as much as "Demon Copperhead", but I appreciate that Kingsolver deliberately set out to write a different kind of book, as any great writer should, rather than writing the same novel again. The way she has woven music into its structure and its heroine's inner life is inspiring, and many of her most important themes are here too: class, Appalachia, health care that fails working-class people, and gay characters at the heart of the story. It's a smaller and more personal novel, and in its quieter way a very moving one.
The novel opens with an epigraph from Toni Morrison: "Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt." Livia's own answer is in her definition of a partita, where the parts are all different and the artist's work is to make them add up to something that feels whole. I expect "Partita" to be nominated for prizes such as the Women's Prize, though I don't expect it to win. Beyond the story itself, I loved how it sent me back to music, and it might finally get me sitting down at that piano. If you've read it, did you listen along with the Listening List, and did it change your experience of the story? And what's your favourite Kingsolver novel? I'd love to hear.
