Richard Crawford, Summertime **

 I've been interested for a while in a biography of George Gershwin. As Crawford says in his introduction, there are "some two dozen strong." I bought Summertime because (a) I found it in the bookstore and (b) it promised to be an "account of Gershwin's life in music" by a musical scholar. I looked forward to learning about the development of Gershwin's style and how it differs from his contemporaries in both musical theater and classical music.

Unfortunately, Summertime tells me next to nothing about what makes Gershwin distinctive.  Many, many pages outline the (frothy) plots of Broadway shows, with only occasional sentences describing the music. What differentiates a Gershwin tune from a Jerome Kerns tune? No idea. Gershwin is said to have brought jazz into the realm of serious music, but what does "jazz" mean in this case? Syncopation? D7 chords? Clarinets? Crawford includes excerpts from reviews of Gershwin's classical output, from which I conclude that his work was more popular than respected. What aspects of contemporary serious music influenced Gershwin? On page 250, Crawford claims Alban Berg, "whose music differed go greatly in style from his own, as a "later influence," but never says how or mentions Berg again.

I would also have liked (and expected) to learn about the contemporary reaction to two white guys writing Porgy and Bess, an opera about the African-American experience. Some of the quoted reviews are embarrassing in the way they diminish the contributions of the cast: "The way in which [actors] have been instructed, directed, molded into a vast, responsive unit is little short of thrilling." It's a notable contrast to the credit given to, say, Fred Astaire in earlier productions. There's one short excerpt from a black reviewer, but it's passed over without commentary. Unacceptable for a book published in 2019.

The book is theoretically about Gershwin's music rather than his life, so I can't complain about the lack of information about George as a person. The anecdotes that do appear don't paint a very flattering portrait of the man, not matter if he was always the life of the party.

Frustrating. It's the rare book about a musician that makes me less interested in his work.

Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories *** 1/2

 Mavis Gallant is expert at conjuring a milieu, such as post-war Germany ("The Latehomecomer") or the French Riviera ("The Moslem Wife"). Her characters, major and minor, are effectively drawn. The narrative feels natural or, less charitably, secondary. Her sumptuous writing style sounds like it comes from the first half of the 20th century; it's always surprising when a story turns out to be taking place in the 1980s.

My favorite story was "The Remission," in which a British family moves to a small village in the south of France so that the father can "die on the Riviera." He doesn't fade as quickly as anticipated, and the family needs to adjust their plans to make a life in the new locale. An excellent portrait of the village, of the casual colonialism of the expatriates, and the sundry motivations of the characters. The story ends with an awesome moment at the (eventual) funeral, the lapse when:

every person in the room, at the same moment, spoke and thought of something other than Alec. This lapse, this inattention, lasting no longer than was needed to say "No, thank you" or "Oh, really" or "Yes, I see," was enough to create the dark gap marking the end of Alec's span. He ceased to be, and it made absolutely no difference after that whether or not he was forgotten.