It’s 1977 in Roanville, Kentucky, and Marie Higginbotham wants to be a dancer. Marie’s best friend is the spirit of long-dead Romantic Polish composer Frédéric Chopin – a sardonic and judgemental sidekick – and her father is an adjunct professor and religious zealot who, when he isn’t swooning over Chopin’s records, is beating the hell out of Marie and her many siblings. When the Paris (Kentucky) Ballet comes to town, Marie is smitten; when she befriends the new kid at school, Misty McPherson, and then gets to take actual ballet lessons, she starts to see a future for herself…
Chopin in Kentucky is a classic Künstlerroman, or artist’s novel: we watch as Marie struggles against the odds to realise her dream against a hell of a pack of odds. But it’s also a comedy, an irreverently nostalgic nod to the cultural stylings of the late seventies and early eighties, and a deeply sad account of domestic abuse and life in abject poverty. The effect is a book that’s both uproarious and moving: as the book progresses, the humour that lent itself early on to childish pranks and pratfalls serves later to highlight the bleak reality of, for instance, Marie’s mother’s attempts to forge a life of her own, and the plight of Marie’s younger siblings, who don’t have the same escape routes as does Marie, via dance, or her older sister, via the violin. Misty – the World’s First Female Child Elvis Impersonator, old hand at pageants and rural talent contests, wannabe Gong Show contestant – is Marie’s counterpoint, but Chopin in Kentucky, while dabbling in the fantastical, is otherwise relentlessly realistic: success, it reminds us, comes at a hell of a price, not many get a taste, and those who do, probably do so by lifting armfuls of garbage at four in the morning.
So, there’s a lot packed into this little book. Each chapter is short, and each chapter title riffs off Chopin, and Marie’s early immersion into classical music: Tornado Forte, Hog Feed Sonata, Armageddon Ensemble. At the very beginning, Marie passes on Chopin’s teachings: ‘Life is lived in preludes: beginnings, fragments, moods-in-miniature’, and the book is structured as such. The result is a text that’s superlatively energetic, each mood conveyed with an intensity worthy of Chopin himself, who skirts the perimeters of the novel, commenting on each new development (Misty is, he announces, ‘indecorous’), gently encouraging Marie (‘There is always a way for the forbidden and the impossible’) and acting as a template for a vision of overcoming the odds (his ill-health). It’s a beautifully layered and structured text – oh, Dolores! – and Marie’s parents, in particular, are sketched out with an immense nuance that conveys both the child’s partial understanding of their situations and the suffering that underpins it. Her mother, Junie, is trapped – by poverty, by endless pregnancy, by a conservative society and a conservative husband – in an oppressive marriage, and lurches from one escape outlet to another (sewing, puppetry, a breakdown, a lesbian affair), while Don, the father, enacts upon his family the diktats of his vengeful God, whilst also passing on to Marie his love for classical music, which is, ultimately what allows her to escape.
What makes this such a joy to read is that Heichelbech manages to effectively portray with great humour and affection the reality of growing up in unabashed poverty in a repressive home without romanticising, exoticising or fetishising it. Marie’s life is not to be envied, but neither is she to be pitied; the surreal elements aside, this is very real, and real life is funny as well as awful, and the Paris ballet might well come to your town and change your life.
Any Cop?: Sheer fist-pumping joy.
Valerie O’Riordan
Bookmunch 