A Brilliant, Magical Novel

In a stunning, vividly imagined debut former musician Matthew Gallaway merges literature and music to take us on a journey between Parisian music halls of the1860's and contemporary New York City. A literate, scrupulously detailed author he relates his story through four people whose lives are bound together by Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. How could this be considering the disparity not only in time but personalities? The artistry of this amazing new author has made it so.

One needn't be an opera lover to be enchanted by Gallaway's precise, color-filled prose as we are introduced first to Martin a highly successful Manhattan attorney. He is 41-years-old, a former star hockey play at Cornell who now carries a "not insubstantial paunch, " is HIV positive, and suffers a "vague if incessant dissatisfaction."

It is NYC in 1960 that Anna awakens to remember her stellar Isolde performance last evening. She's the toast of the town, besieged with congratulations and offers, yet she worries "about loneliness; it was such a common lament among top singers." After a divorce from her older husband she has dated frequently; the men had been pleasant but that was it. However, at the opera's after party she had met an intriguing man, an antiques dealer.

For this reader an incredibly fascinating member of this quartet is Maria, an adopted child who as a baby was given to screaming fits that were only quieted by the playing of a Callas record. She grows into a tall, ungainly teenager, the object of ridicule by her classmates. Maria loves to sing and longs to escape Pittsburgh, to learn how to use her remarkable voice.

The fourth character is Lucien Marchand whom we meet as a nine-year-old boy living with his widowed father. It is Paris and the year is 1846. The elder Marchand is a scientist, while Lucien is a musician, a dreamer who spends hours at the piano. The teacher and headmaster at his school are dismayed with the boy because none of the other students "shared such a distracting desire for the stage."

The stories of this foursome are related in brief alternating chapters as each one struggles with what life has given them and how to take their places in the world. THE METROPOLIS CASE is set as opulently as grand opera and composed of the same elements - love, hate, betrayal, death, joy, forgiveness and, of course, music.

Matthew Gallaway has given us a brilliant, magical novel, broad in scope, and elegantly rendered.

- Gail Cooke