Mr. Beethoven by Paul Griffiths

We have come this far largely in silence. We have played the game. We have done our part. But we cannot go on keeping quiet when you continue to withhold what we most want to know, which is not the facts of the matter but the fiction. Is Beethoven really stalling? If so, why? Or has he in fact (as it were) almost finished the score? Or has he hit a block? Most of all, what is the supposed subject of this supposed oratorio? You must know. We have been patient long enough. Over to you. Get on with it.

Suppose that Beethoven did not die in 1827 but lived a few more years. And suppose that he came to the United States, where he spent six months in the vicinity of Boston, writing a brand new oratorio at the bequest of the Haydn and Handel Choral Society. Unable to speak with his benefactors--he's deaf, after all, in this timeline, too--he is introduced to a woman named Thankful, who teaches him the style of sign language that emerged in the 19th century on Martha's Vineyard. This is the story of Paul Griffiths' Mr. Beethoven, another of those novels that enters upon the life of a real historical person (feels like I've read a million of these this year, because I love them) but one that does it with more self-consciousness than most. Griffiths makes the artifice as much the subject of the novel as Beethoven himself, laying out the sources he draws from, building up scenes and then revising them, fretting over whether questions of what might really have been.

One of the book's central ironies, I think, is this: Mr. Beethoven is a novel about interpolation, the transmutation of historical fact into historical fiction. Griffiths, or the narrator who takes his place, broadcasts certain scruples about precision and accuracy. All of Beethoven's dialogue, for example, is taken directly from his real-life letters. But after introducing Thankful, who literally interpolates Beethoven's language by reporting his words in English, she becomes hidden, occluded: watch Beethoven, for example, carry on a flirtatious conversation with a widow. The dialogue looks like dialogue, and we forget that it's all really Thankful, expressing in sign language what Ms. Hill says to Beethoven, and in English (funnily, a language Beethoven does not speak) what Beethoven says to Ms. Hill. In this way, Mr. Beethoven is sort of a funny meditation on the mediating forces, sometimes visible and sometimes not, that lie between fact and interpretation.

All that is very interesting. But often I felt, as the imagined reader feels in the quoted passage above, that I wanted to know "not the facts of the matter but the fiction." The novel opens with incredible slowness, futzing around for a while with questions of sourcing and historical accuracy, while Beethoven the character does little more than sit in empty rooms, not writing an oratorio. Much more interesting, I thought, was the later novel, which has its metafictional tricks--a chapter made up of a single long sentence, for example--but which has a better story, the story of the composition and performance of the fictional oratorio, which is based on the Biblical story of Job.

I especially liked a scene, apparently based on a real life event, in which a Massachusett Indian elder is invited to observe the rehearsals for Beethoven's oratorio, but shows an interest only in the pipe organ, which she takes, quite correctly, to be a holy object in which spirits, after a fashion, live. I also liked the way that Griffiths fashions a very literal artistic lineage between the old world classicism of Beethoven and the art of the new world: an interview of Beethoven by a young Walt Whitman is very funny, and it is suggested that a young Emily Dickinson is in attendance for the oratorio's premiere, and that perhaps she even takes from its simple, honed language inspiration for her adult poetry. (The oratorio itself, printed in full, might be the novel's most inspired production.)

In the end, I thought Mr. Beethoven was more interesting than engaging. Maybe I'm just one of those impatient readers who wants the fiction, and not to be reminded of the facts.