Absolute Music

On an eerily warm October evening in
a suburb of Detroit, a new father and struggling fantasy novelist named McPhail
gazes at a honey locust tree. The sight triggers a
memory of the sudden, inexplicable death of Hannah, whom he loved when they
were both fourteen. So begins a year-long odyssey, in which McPhail becomes
obsessed with recollections of Hannah, puts his job and his marriage in
jeopardy, and fears that his “obsolete consciousness” is spiraling into
apocalyptic religious and ecological despair.


Unable to complete the fantasy he
is contracted to write, McPhail instead composes this “book behind the book” in
his effort to re-enchant the world for himself and his growing family and to
lay to rest old griefs along with more recent regrets.



Metaphysical, lyrical, elegiac, Absolute
Music is a novel of consciousness that is at the same time grounded in
memorable characters and shaped by a variety of landscapes from Cincinnati and
Pittsburgh to County Clare and Japan. In the character of McPhail you might
detect a distant cousin of Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling or Richard Ford’s Frank
Bascombe, but he remains very much a man of our own time.