“This is the winner of the worst book cover of the year award,” said a customer at Ridgecrest Books up in Shoreline over the weekend. She hefted the new Barbara Kingsolver novel Partita in her hands so the bookseller could see, then turned the cover back toward her. “God, I just hate this cover so much,” she added.
I guess I can see where she’s coming from, though I don’t share her assessment. I do think the cover of Partita recalls a very particular and very overdone moment in late-1990s cover design—the idea of some blurry body parts with very white skin, set against a dark background, recalls forgettable novels with obnoxious titles like The Headmaster’s Wife or Mycroft’s Assistant.
But I happened to have just finished reading Partita, and I thought the cover did a fair enough job of hinting at the story inside. Those arms on the cover, on closer inspection, are playing the piano, and the blur implies that the playing is both passionate and complex. Partita is in fact about a skilled piano player, and her hands play an important role in the story.
I wouldn’t call Partita one of Kingsolver’s major works, but it is a strangely compelling story. It tracks the protagonist’s life from her childhood as a virtuoso to her passionate youth as a lover and an aspiring professional musician to the disappointments and minor-key joys of her later years.
There are plot points in the book that undoubtedly some more conservative reviewers will ding as “political.” But really Kingsolver brings a Dickensian eye for social justice to the plot, putting her readers behind the eyes of a poor woman in a red state and forcing them to live through a very real system of indignities. I don’t want to say more; that passage in the middle of the book is worth the price of admission on its own.
Kingsolver plays with time and theme in quiet but confident ways. I can’t quite figure out how she manages to transition so gently through the span of an entire life in a way that doesn’t feel jarring. In the hands of a lesser novelist, this thing would have been a catastrophe, but instead it’s an assured and insistent story of one woman’s life, beautifully told. Don’t let the cover stop you.