THE MUSIC STALKER tells the story of the Covo family. Adel suffers from schizophrenia, hearing voices and seeing hallucinations, but with Thorazine and determination has been a mother to her children, Kayla and Max. Her husband Nicky is a psychiatrist wrestling with the scars of surviving the Holocaust. While Max shows an interest in the piano at a young age and makes rapid progress with a local teacher, his little sister Kayla soon emerges as the true musical genius. As Kayla attends a prestigious school in Manhattan in order to study under the famed instructor, Heinz Lindorf, Max wrestles with resentment as Kayla takes what he thought would be his own path in the world—as well as his worry over disturbing signs that Kayla may have inherited her mother’s illness.
As Kayla’s fame grows, her family rashly signs up with a management company that puts the young girl out on grueling tours and plays up her beauty and sexuality in its advertising—all while keeping almost all the revenue. Even after the family turns to an old lawyer friend to extricate themselves from the bad deal, Kayla’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic. She claims to see a tall, menacing man in the audience at her shows, a man she is convinced means to kill her. She begins an age-inappropriate relationship with an older violinist when they go on tour together. And she begins visiting a Chabad house in Manhattan to seek the guidance of Rabbi Berenbaum as she struggles with a growing sense of loss over her family’s resolute lack of religion. All of these issues converge on a breaking point where everything changes and Max must come to terms with his own feeling and motives.
Bruce Berger writes with warmth and attention to detail, bringing the Covo family’s experience to life. His exploration of mental illness makes Adel a fully-fledged character, a woman aware of her brain’s mis-firings and yet helpless against them in many ways. And if Kayla’s own mental imbalance is obviously telegraphed, his exploration of its connection to her rapturous, effortless musical genius is fascinating. Berger’s decision to tell the story with two narrative voices—the grown up Max, writing a letter to his children as they prepare to visit him and their aunt after a contentious divorce, and an omniscient third-person narrator—unfortunately mutes some of the potential force, as the narrations lead to repetitions. Late in the story, for example, the identity of the perpetrator of a minor bit of vandalism is revealed twice within one page, and a potentially powerful moment is muted as a result.
Some aspects of the story are bit under-served, as well. We spend a lot of time with Adel and Nicky and learn of their struggles, but Kayla’s sudden swerve into spirituality seems rushed, and isn’t deeply explored. Adel and Nicky display curious passivity as parents, doing almost nothing to prevent their teen daughter from roaming the world unsupervised, which feels at times like a contrivance to set up the situations required by the plot. And the breathless tone of the early chapters as Max promises to tell Kayla’s story hints at a dramatic ending, but the ending just sort of arrives without much fanfare.
Bruce Berger’s THE MUSIC STALKER is a thoughtful, enjoyable story and an interesting study of mental illness, spirituality, and artistic genius—and the possible relationship between them.
~Jeff Somers for IndieReader