SIMON SILBER: WORKS FOR SOLO PIANO

Highly entertaining debut in which the worst composer in history hires perhaps the worst biographer in the business to write the story of his life.

Liner notes for failure are the dreamlike stuff Miller’s tale is made of. More in love with the idea of having one of his offspring become a musical prodigy than with the idea of creating beautiful music, Simon Silber’s father relentlessly drilled him in the piano from a ridiculously young age—creating, unfortunately, instead of a modern-day Beethoven, a cretinous sociopath whose utter lack of talent or inspiration failed ever to divert him from his aim of becoming a great composer. Ingeniously, Miller presents the novel as a set of liner notes for the “definitive” 4-CD set of recordings of Silber’s ungodly music. Written by one Norm Fayrewether, the notes only peripherally deal with the compositions but are used mainly as an excuse for Fayrewether to pontificate on his relationship with the composer, whom he equals in obstinate delusions about his own (absent) genius. While Fayrewether appreciates (and shares) Silber’s misanthropy, he makes very clear his contempt for the music—a more disturbing collection of impudent noise masquerading as avant-garde not being imaginable. Of “Helen,” he writes that “Silber told me once that he’d set out to write the ugliest possible piece of music that would still strike his sister as beautiful, and that he’d been appalled by just how ugly that turned out to be, so great was the gulf between his sense of beauty and hers.” Their relationship disastrous from the beginning, Fayrewether and Silber are a perfectly matched pair of pretentious poseurs who give Miller a fine time as he regales us with one tale after another, bursting bubbles of pomposity on every page.

A sly collection of black riffs on overinflated egos, the false trap of genius, and the sad truth that many, many people are—well, puffed-up mediocrities.