AMERICAN MUSIC

History repeats itself with a vengeance when the tentative relationship between a wounded Iraq War veteran and his physical therapist releases a torrent of memories, dreams and alternate lives.

Flown to the Bronx VA hospital after suffering a paralyzing spinal-cord injury, Milo Hatch won’t lie on his back and doesn’t much like to talk. But like it or not, he speaks in wondrous other ways to Honor, the young therapist who’s been assigned to his case. When she touches different parts of his body, she can see the story of Joe, the sax player who left his wife Pearl for her cousin Vivian back in the 1930s; of Iris Michaels, the pregnant wife of an Army medical officer court-martialed ostensibly for his goatee and insubordination, but really for his complaints about inadequate supplies in the Vietnam War; and of Parvin, the young dancer captured for Sultan Murad IV’s harem in 1623, who captures in turn the love of two very different members of the sultan’s court. What do these different stories have to do with each other? By the time she’s reached the end of this luminous fable, Mendelsohn (Innocence, 2000, etc.) will have fulfilled the promise of her many repeated motifs—names like Avedis and Anna, elements like green eyes, cymbals, dancing and angels, people like Count Basie, places like Egypt—to link them in relatively orthodox ways in something like the family history of an extended spiritual family. Even after she’s pulled the threads together, however, it seems fairer and more resonant to regard Milo’s body as a radio receiver, photo album or, as Honor says, “a haunted house” that lives by giving voice to these tales.

A magically consoling reminder that beneath the starkest case of wounding and healing is the music of love lost and found.