Grace notes /

Catherine McKenna returns home to northern Ireland from her current residence, Glasgow, to attend the funeral of her estranged father. Now a single mother, Catherine and her mother use the opportunity to attempt to bridge the distance between them, for they have not seen each other in five years. This latest novel by a first-rate northern Irish fiction writer is both a graceful character study and a sensitive depiction of family discord and peacemaking.

Rarely the territory of male writers, the travails of postnatal depression and single motherhood get a sober, delicate treatment in the third novel from popular Northern Irish author MacLaverty (Lamb; Cal). The novel opens at the funeral of Catherine McKenna's father, a small-town publican, and goes back to trace Catherine's journey from her hometown, through music school in Scotland, into the male-dominated world of musical composition. Along the way, she takes up with Dave, a charming but ultimately abusive alcoholic; when she becomes pregnant, the conflict between her music and the endless demands of motherhood force her into an artistic impasse. Having left Dave, she battles clinical depression; having returned home, she must face the painful, irreconcilable differences of opinion and outlook that for years have estranged her from her religious parents, her Irishness and her church. The narrative moves gracefully from present to past, as childhood memories provide welcome moments of comfort and comic relief amid Catherine's wry reflections on her craft and her struggles to practice it. The most interesting writing manifests itself in Catherine's expression of her creative philosophy: her sources of inspiration, the process of composition and how the tones, textures and rhythms of sound blend to create what we appreciate as music. McLaverty's own music here is restrained and spare, but it swells to a crescendo in the denouement when one of Catherine's compositions is played in concert. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A lyric novel about music and motherhood. Catherine McKenna is an Irish-born pianist and composer whose emotional turbulence sets the tone for a significant part of the story's soft yet visceral verbal music. Catherine's unusually delicate sense of psychic balance is thrown off by two events in particular: the birth of her first child, Anna, and the sudden death of her estranged yet beloved father. Catherine is not married; her mate is a (mostly) lovable drunkard. As an iconoclastic only child who left her family's home in a small town near Belfast for a university education and career in Scotland, the adult Catherine rarely visits or phones her disappointed parents. Her musical career, though, is flourishing, with the BBC broadcasting her work and commissions coming her way at last. Using flashbacks, interior monologues, and dialogue, MacLaverty very gradually creates a complex, dimensional character, until the third-person narrative seems to speak directly to us from Catherine's struggling soul: ``It gave Catherine a strange feeling, this invisible cascade of darkness. She felt suffocated by it quilting downwards--whatever it was. This diminuendo of light brought about by something intangible--odourless--invisible.'' The drawback of MacLaverty's mildly impressionistic approach is the slow, even anticlimactic pace of some scenes, those portraying the domesticity of Catherine's relatively cloistered life, for example, or those, especially, involving her father's death, which open the story. Catherine's character, as it emerges from the fragmentary narrative, tends to overshadow everyone else in a novel guided less by ``story'' than by musical tides and perturbations. It's clear that MacLaverty (Walking the Dog, 1995, etc.) has tried to do something rather difficult: to suggest the interior life of an artist struggling to balance the urgent demands of creating music and the equally pressing demands of life. Very often, he succeeds in this complex portrait of a woman who is, first and foremost, an artist.