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The Missouri Review 27.1 (2004) 186-188



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MR Lost Classic

Harry Belten and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, by Barry Targan. University of Iowa Press, 1975, 279 pp.

Barry Targan's first book-length work of fiction was published after he won the Iowa School of Arts and Letters Award for Short Fiction in 1975. Esquire had published the title story a decade earlier. Another story, "Old Vemish," had appeared in the 1974 Best American Short Stories prize anthology. Targan's collection of fiction, now approaching its thirty-year anniversary, continues to resonate for many reasons: its innovative storylines, unforgettable characters, page-by-page liveliness . . . but most of all, perhaps, for its generous spirit.

Immediately noticeable is how different these stories are in the treatment of postwar, middle-class suburbia from the short fiction of such better-known writers as John Updike and Raymond Carver. A crude but useful way to summarize the difference is that Targan's work is less pessimistic in tone and attitude, less bleak and puts more faith in individual agency. Characters have the power to make changes in their lives. Sometimes they succeed. And when they fail, they fail because of decisions they make or fail to make rather than because failure is somehow inevitable.

The collection's title story begins with an epigraph: If a thing is worth doing, surely it is worth doing badly. From the opening page, it does [End Page 186] what the best stories do, and what Targan's fiction consistently does: shuffles the deck of conventional wisdom. In this instance, Harry Belten, hardware store employee and amateur violinist, decides to remortgage his house so that he can hire a professional orchestra and give a one-time-only performance, with himself as soloist, performing his favorite piece of music—the extremely difficult Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor. His wife thinks he's gone crazy. His friends think he's crazy. So does his boss. But Belten has been practicing this piece of music for eighteen years and, though well aware of his own limits as a musician, remains undeterred in following his dream.

The story chronicles the months leading up to Belten's concert and culminating in his joyously mediocre performance. Targan's omniscient narrator probes the ambivalence each character feels about Belten's musical aspirations, exposing their assumptions about the purpose of art, the value of money and the definition of madness. With perseverance and grace, Belten confronts the cynicism in his community, cynicism being a theme explored in several of Targan's stories.

The stories in this collection are rich and complex. Some, for instance, ". . . and still the heart doth sing," are also wickedly funny. A poetry editor begins his tenure at a highbrow and influential New York magazine called New Literature. His first task is to read a stack of unsolicited poems. Each, he discovers, is worse than the last. (One poem begins: "This is for my little dog Johnny/Who I love and always give a hug/Even if he goes wee-wee/All over the living room rug.") The new editor, en-trusted with continuing the magazine's rich poetic heritage, sends cruel and discouraging letters to these hopeless scribes, yet they all take the very fact of his correspondence with them as encouragement to submit more poems. As the editor's correspondence with these unfailingly optimistic and earnest "poets" develops, the editor questions his own assumptions about the goal of art and the responsibility of exerting one's power.

The book balances its intelligent humor with more distressing presentations of life gone awry. In "Little Parameters," Louis steadfastly refuses to accept money from his father-in-law, Aaron, though he and his wife are attending graduate school and could desperately use help. Pride is at stake for both men, however, as seen in the increasingly hostile letters exchanged between them. The stakes increase when Louis and his wife have a child. Told in the aftermath of Louis's separation from his wife, this story beautifully portrays the psychology of a character aware of his own tragic weakness...

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