Deciding who has the right to tell America's story is a hot topic these days, as people on the right and left debate how much of our history omits the contributions of people of color, and what, if anything, should be done about it.
"Whitewashing" history plays a significant role in Brendan Slocumb's stirring second novel, "Symphony of Secrets." It's a provocative follow to his much-lauded 2022 novel, "The Violin Conspiracy," praised for its pitch-perfect dive into the world of classical music and the struggles faced by Black musicians who want to be included and respected for their talents.
Slocumb, an educator and musician, spun a page-turning thriller about a stolen Stradivarius violin in "The Violin Conspiracy." Theft also plays a key role in this new novel, as Bern Hendricks, a professor at the University of Virginia, stumbles onto one of the biggest deceptions in music history.
What Hendricks unearths is related to the discovery of a musical masterpiece, missing for nearly 100 years, attributed to Frederick Delaney, a prolific 20th-century composer.
Hendricks is thrilled when he's hired by the Delaney Foundation to create a new score based on the found manuscript. But before long, Hendricks and Eboni Washington, a cyber security expert, begin to have their suspicions about the origin of the composition as well as most of Delaney's other works. Delaney, who was white, often drew on the musical styles of indigenous peoples, and the opera Hendricks is scoring is different from the version that premiered to surprisingly bad reviews a century earlier.
The novel's second timeline is set in New York during the Jazz Age. It centers on Delaney's rise to fame and the enigmatic life of Josephine Reed, a Black musical savant who is told, time and again, that the music she creates has no value because she's Black. Delaney and Reed form a strange and disturbing partnership, and it becomes the focus of Hendricks and Washington's questioning of Delaney's body of work.
Their investigation moves at a measured pace as they struggle to find the link between Delaney and Reed, but it's in the book's compelling last 100 pages that the story steamrolls toward the truth about Delaney and what happened to Reed.
Readers may see what's coming as they follow Hendricks' investigation, but Slocumb writes an intriguing and vivid story about social injustice, cultural appropriation and "whitewashing."
While "Symphony of Secrets" is not a thrill-a-minute story like the one embedded in "The Violin Conspiracy," its more thoughtful pacing carries an important message about race and privilege and the lengths to which people in power will go to manipulate history.
Carol Memmott is a writer in Austin, Texas.
Symphony of Secrets
By: Brendan Slocumb.
Publisher: Anchor Books, 448 pages, $28.
