Cather, Willa. Lucy Gayheart (1935). New York: Vintage Classics, 1995.

I have the blues. The semester is nearing completion, and the month of May—May! doesn’t everything incredible happen in May?—is coming up, the month when I can start reading the books I want and need to read, like, for instance, the new Leavitt biography of Turing, Vollman’s Europe Central, one hundred thousand other books scattered around my room, and but I can’t yet because I’ve still got books printed on syllabi to get through. Lucy Gayheart is such a book. I got through it. It wasn’t difficult, being all of 190 pages. Lucy is a girl from a small Nebraska town who leaves for Chicago to study the piano. Soon she begins accompanying for a world-class tenor, and they fall in love. Halfway through the book he drowns, and we spend the rest of the time looking at the small town looking at Lucy, who’s returned home but no one knows exactly why.

I think it was the single-threadedness of the plot that was unsatisfying. Also, I’m not sure what Willa is saying with this novel. Good people often die before their time? Love that is pure (for one’s art, for one’s artists) cannot last, is destined for doom? I think Cather’s career is a bell curve—are all writers’?—one that began strong with the first Nebraska novels and peaked gorgeously with The Professor’s House and (maybe) Archbishop, and then went south. I wonder what Cather scholars would think of such a claim. I wonder how terrible her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, due next week, will be.

Finally, I’m a bit of a collector of failed drag names (Fellatia Sorejaws, Chlamydia Claptrap), and this novel’s got a pretty good one. Spelled Loosey, of course.