cover image The Upright Piano Player

The Upright Piano Player

David Abbott. Doubleday/Talese, $21.95 (240p) ISBN 978-0-385-53442-0

In an elegant debut filled with anguish and yearning, a retired London executive stumbles through a detached life of loss and muted violence. After Henry Cage retires from the consulting firm he founded but lost control of, his quiet, solitary life closes in around him. His estranged son, Tom, lives on the coast with his wife and four-year-old son, Hal, whom Henry has never met, but who provides a catalyst for the family to reconnect once Tom tells Henry he's a grandfather. Also on the docket for a reconnection is Henry's ex-wife, Nessa, who now lives in Florida and, unbeknownst to Henry, is stricken with terminal cancer. Abbott takes these broken relationships and slowly works over their frayed ends with a delicate touch, sometimes mending them and other times hitting exposed nerves, and when Henry becomes the object of an obsessed violent stalker, the novel takes on a welcome texture of subtle menace that colors the unfolding family dramas. It's a very careful novel in its structure and revelations, but Abbott impresses most in his easy balance of the disparate plot elements (the stalker bit, which threatens to dip into the sensational, is precisely controlled) and overarching themes of reconnection and regret. (June)