The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Clara, by Janice Galloway
reviewed by Jean Smith

Janice Galloway. Clara. Simon & Schuster, 2003. 425 pp. $25.00.

This extensively researched biographical novel about concert pianist Clara Schumann requires a supple mind. Accept this as a viable version of Clara’s life, and the piano lid of doubt will cease its incessant slamming across your bruised knuckles. Galloway, intent on faithful, empathetic renderings, spent six years writing the book, studying letters, diaries, and biographies, along with detailed histories of the era, to create a swirling demonstration of the Schumanns’ daily life. Galloway choreographs a visceral sleight-of-hand, tugging the reader within variable degrees of proximity to Clara’s voice and those of both her overcontrolling father and Robert Schumann, composer slash addled husband. Stripped of heroic veneer, a demivulgar fecundity hangs in the air—seams of gloved hands seep, a bandage is the color of cheese, cigar smoke fills florid rooms. Enmeshed with Robert—to whom she feeds “jellied wine from her own fingers” while he suffers “pains and fears he could not describe”—Clara tours Europe and performs brilliantly. Ever dutiful, Clara copes with whatever comes up. After a miscarriage, blood clots slithering through her body, she calculates stain-potential and opts for a maroon dress for the evening’s performance. Robert is a guy who is evidently irritated by everything, including the color of the walls. Aggravated by his wife’s success and his inability to support his large family, Robert comes across as a bit of a weenie. Clara, equal parts breadwinner and Stepford wife, alters her behaviors to accommodate everyone around her. Her own diary was, for a time, dictated to her by her father, who felt compelled to manipulate how the family would be perceived by future historians and biographers. Show me a two-artist-eight-baby household, in any era, where at least one parent isn’t on the brink of insanity; that the female partner endures the burden of responsibility better is perhaps simply an underdocumented occurrence.