THE GOLDBERG MUTILATIONS

Glenn Gould wakes up in a hotel room he has no memory of checking into, alarmingly separated from the potpourri of pills that permit him to navigate life. The scene he discovers in his room is as bizarre as it is macabre—a woman has been hacked to death with a hatchet, and a record player that is not his own is playing a recording of him (he doesn’t own that either) performing the Goldberg Variations on repeat. Stuffed in the victim’s mouth is a crumpled piece of paper on which is printed a hostile review of one of his performances, written by the critic Paul Henry Lang. Later, Gould learns the dead woman is a housekeeper who thought ill of him. Detective Inspector Dziurzynski interviews Gould and points out plainly how incriminating the scene is. Gould protests he is not only innocent but bewildered, lost in a “placid, medicinal haze,” his “nervous system in a state of fray”; the musician’s relentlessly neurotic condition is vividly and humorously depicted by the author in this enchantingly peculiar novel. Lang turns up dead next—he is killed within a day of the housekeeper’s demise—but Gould insists, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that his hands are clean. The possibilities are many; maybe Gould is being framed? Of course, if he is not the killer, surely his life is in grave danger. As Dziurzynski notes: “If what I believe is correct, Mister Gould, there is someone very dangerous standing behind you, in the dark, breathing down your neck. They’ve proven themselves not only vicious, but calculating. Patient. In one way or another, however unwittingly, you are their link to whichever macabre impulse fuels this blood-thirsty endeavor.”D’Stair has composed a grippingly deconstructed version of the classic crime drama—not only is it never entirely obvious who the killer is, it’s never certain Gould can rule himself out. It might even be the case there is another Glenn Gould somewhere, a doppelgänger of sorts. The reader will never solve the crime or predict the novel’s defiantly strange ending—that is a decisive neatness the author seems intent on undermining. D’Stair paints a dizzying picture that is deliciously complex; apparently, there is nothing as philosophically intractable as murder. As Dziurzynski declaims: “Murder is gonna be the most convoluted kerfuffle imaginable. Not even imaginable! A happenstance so outside typical human experience the truth of any instance would sound farcical if laid out by barristers to jury-folk.” The dialogue between Dziurzynski and Gould can be a touch cute—snappy one-liners are exchanged with a manufactured alacrity and a contrived rhetorical refinement. But even this literary hyperbole seems appropriate if understood as an ironic comment on the detective genre, a reinvention of a style that must be as much commandeered as it is renovated. Either way, the prose is never a fatal distraction, and one can’t help but be fascinated by Gould’s compelling amalgam of genius and mental disability. This is a thrillingly unconventional novel, one that successfully reinvents an old literary convention from the inside.

Mar 15, 2025 - 07:34

Glenn Gould wakes up in a hotel room he has no memory of checking into, alarmingly separated from the potpourri of pills that permit him to navigate life. The scene he discovers in his room is as bizarre as it is macabre—a woman has been hacked to death with a hatchet, and a record player that is not his own is playing a recording of him (he doesn’t own that either) performing the Goldberg Variations on repeat. Stuffed in the victim’s mouth is a crumpled piece of paper on which is printed a hostile review of one of his performances, written by the critic Paul Henry Lang. Later, Gould learns the dead woman is a housekeeper who thought ill of him. Detective Inspector Dziurzynski interviews Gould and points out plainly how incriminating the scene is. Gould protests he is not only innocent but bewildered, lost in a “placid, medicinal haze,” his “nervous system in a state of fray”; the musician’s relentlessly neurotic condition is vividly and humorously depicted by the author in this enchantingly peculiar novel. Lang turns up dead next—he is killed within a day of the housekeeper’s demise—but Gould insists, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that his hands are clean. The possibilities are many; maybe Gould is being framed? Of course, if he is not the killer, surely his life is in grave danger. As Dziurzynski notes: “If what I believe is correct, Mister Gould, there is someone very dangerous standing behind you, in the dark, breathing down your neck. They’ve proven themselves not only vicious, but calculating. Patient. In one way or another, however unwittingly, you are their link to whichever macabre impulse fuels this blood-thirsty endeavor.”

D’Stair has composed a grippingly deconstructed version of the classic crime drama—not only is it never entirely obvious who the killer is, it’s never certain Gould can rule himself out. It might even be the case there is another Glenn Gould somewhere, a doppelgänger of sorts. The reader will never solve the crime or predict the novel’s defiantly strange ending—that is a decisive neatness the author seems intent on undermining. D’Stair paints a dizzying picture that is deliciously complex; apparently, there is nothing as philosophically intractable as murder. As Dziurzynski declaims: “Murder is gonna be the most convoluted kerfuffle imaginable. Not even imaginable! A happenstance so outside typical human experience the truth of any instance would sound farcical if laid out by barristers to jury-folk.” The dialogue between Dziurzynski and Gould can be a touch cute—snappy one-liners are exchanged with a manufactured alacrity and a contrived rhetorical refinement. But even this literary hyperbole seems appropriate if understood as an ironic comment on the detective genre, a reinvention of a style that must be as much commandeered as it is renovated. Either way, the prose is never a fatal distraction, and one can’t help but be fascinated by Gould’s compelling amalgam of genius and mental disability. This is a thrillingly unconventional novel, one that successfully reinvents an old literary convention from the inside.