Contemporary Authors

• The Ensemble ( novel) Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2018

1. The ensemble : a novel LCCN 2017004103 Type of material Book Personal name Gabel, Aja, author. Main title The ensemble : a novel / Aja Gabel. Published/Produced New York : Riverhead Books, 2018. Projected pub date 1801 Description pages cm ISBN 9780735214767

• Aja Gabel - http://www.ajagabel.com/about-1/

  Aja Gabel's debut novel, The Ensemble, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House.

  Aja's short fiction can be found in New England Review, New Ohio Review, Glimmer Train, BOMB, and elsewhere. Her lyric essay, "The Sparrows in France," appeared in Kenyon Review and earned her an honorable mention in Best American Essays 2015. She has taught fiction, non-fiction, and literature at the University of Virginia, the University of Houston, Sweet Briar College, and Pacific University, as well as at undergraduate creative writing conferences and community workshop organizations. She earned her BA at Wesleyan University, her MFA at the University of Virginia and has a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston.

  Aja has been the recipient of awards from Atlantic Monthly and Inprint, as well as fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she was a fellow in fiction 2012-2013.

  She lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Bear.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/aja-gabel/#!

  Aja Gabel
  Aja Gabel is the author of The Ensemble, and her writing has appeared in BOMB, The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. A former cellist, she earned her B.A. at Wesleyan University, her MFA at the University of Virginia and has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Aja has been the recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee Writers'' Conference, Literary Arts Oregon, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she was a fellow in fiction. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Image by Darcie Burrell.

• NPR - https://www.npr.org/2018/05/19/612286311/the-string-quartet-as-chosen-family-in-the-ensemble

  AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
  The String Quartet As Chosen Family In 'The Ensemble'
  4:57
  DOWNLOAD
  TRANSCRIPT
  May 19, 20187:55 AM ET
  Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday
  Scott Simon
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  The Ensemble
  The Ensemble
  by Aja Gabel

  Hardcover, 339 pages purchase

  Aja Gabel's new novel has music cues for each new section. One of them is for Antonin Dvorak's "American" String Quartet in F, Op. 96, No. 12, which is performed in the opening of the book.

  It's a love story, the famous violinist had said, and even though Jana knew it was not, those were the words that knocked around her brain when she began to play on stage.

  The Ensemble follows Jana and her fellow members of the Van Ness Quartet as they meet, compete and make beautiful music together starting in the early 1990s. The novel follows them through tests, triumphs, temptations, contests, conquests, families and defeats — and every permutation of love, beginning with their love for their art.

  The Ensemble is the debut novel from Aja Gabel, who formerly played the cello pretty seriously herself.

  "I suppose I'm 'former' in that I played intensely and competitively when I was younger, and I don't do that any more," she says in an interview. "And I stopped doing that after college — I wasn't as good as I could hear in my head. And sort of in that way, I relate to one of the characters in my book, who loves it more than he maybe has a natural ability to play it. ...

  "Writing and playing, were two of the only things that I really did very intensely when I was younger. And so I focused — about when I started to write this novel was when I really cut back on playing. There was sort of only room for one at that time."

  Interview Highlights
  On the constant state of competition in the classical music world

  Yes, I think that's a huge part of it. It defines who gets to rise to the top very early on. I was competing from when I was 12 years old, 10 years old. And I think that must do something to you if you continue to do that your whole life. And I really wanted to look at that in these relationships in the characters in the book.

  On the physical demands of being a professional musician

  It is such a physical activity, and I really wanted to write about the way that you — especially if you're playing with someone else — come to know their body, their movements, and the way that playing also wears on your own body.

  On the tug between achieving success as an ensemble and the temptation to become a soloist

  That tension is something I was very interested in because it is such a choice to play in an ensemble. It isn't as glamorous as being a soloist in a lot of ways. That's a curious choice, you know, to choose to do that. I think you have to love what you're creating as a whole more than you love the sound of your own instrument. And those people are endlessly interesting to me. ...

  I think at one point I write in the book that they all have to dream the same dream at the same time for 20 minutes, 40 minutes, however long the piece or the concert is. And when you can successfully do that, there is something transcendent about it. It's one thing to perform your own piece on your own and have that moment with an audience when you've reached something beyond what is there in the room. But when you can do that with three other people, that space is truly, I think, what art-making is about.

  Peter Breslow and Viet Le produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for Web.

• Zyzzyva - http://www.zyzzyva.org/2018/05/17/the-truest-i-could-be-qa-with-the-ensemble-author-aja-gabel/

  The Truest I Could Be: Q&A with ‘The Ensemble’ author Aja Gabel
  BY R.O. KWON
  POSTED ON MAY 17, 2018
  Aja GabelAja Gabel’s first novel, The Ensemble (352 pages; Riverhead), reminds me of why I first, long ago, might have fallen in love with reading. It’s immersive and sweeping, featuring ambitious professional musicians—Jana, Brit, Daniel, and Henry—who form a string quartet. Walter Pater posited that all art aspires to the condition of music; I don’t know if I agree (that “all” makes me nervous), but I’ve thought for years that there isn’t nearly enough writing about music, and musicians. (A few exceptions I love include Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, and now The Ensemble.)

  Gabel and I spoke over email about Baldwin, point of view, YouTube performances, and, of course, music.

  ZYZZYVA: We’ve talked about our shared past lives as would-be professional musicians. Can you tell me about yours, and about what led to your leaving it behind?

  AJA GABEL: “Leaving it behind” is the right phrase to use, but it’s something I had real trouble doing. I started playing violin when I was 5 and switched to the cello when I was 10. I played very intensely until I was about 22, until I finished college. I mostly played chamber music, but studied privately and performed solo as well. It became clearer earlier than that, though, that I wasn’t going to be the sort of conservatory-going, professional career-chasing musician I’d dreamed of being when I was younger. I don’t think I accepted that clarity for a while, though. I continued studying and playing anywhere and everywhere throughout my twenties. I didn’t really let it go—I mean really let it go—until I went to Provincetown to start writing this novel. That was the first time I didn’t take my cello with me when I moved. Not playing every day opened up this space in my brain, enough landscape for an entire novel about the pursuit of music to take hold. Unfortunately, that meant my skill level quickly dissipated. I can still play, but I wouldn’t do it publicly.

  Z: Do you see this past life showing up in how you approach your writing?

  AG: Part of me wants to leave all that how and why of writing to some kind of semi-verbal, semi-unconscious mystery, you know? But if I were going to reverse engineer an influence (I guess that’s what we all do) I would say that there’s a sit-in-the-chair-until-you’ve-done-it-ness I carry over from hours of rehearsal and practicing. I think that’s half the writing battle, staying in the chair. It can be so impossible sometimes, writing, generating. But breaking it up into small, manageable bits, and working it over and over until it speaks the way you want it to speak…well, that’s one and the same with practicing cello. Otherwise, I like writing because it’s not like playing. It’s not social or collaborative, it’s entirely up to me, and there isn’t a single performance to hang my reputation on,,thank god. Can you imagine if we had to read our entire books aloud at, say, Davies Symphony Hall?

  Z: Can you tell me about how you moved between the four musicians’ points of view? Was it challenging at all to keep their voices distinct?

  AG: Absolutely challenging. I think one of the benefits of close third (which the book is in) is that you get to take more liberties with the tone and language. But in terms of what each character was looking at and focusing on, and how they spoke, to themselves and each other, I had to keep them distinct. I had tons of notes about each character’s bio, what was important to each one at different points in their lives, their general attitudes and tics. I had to internalize those notes, though, in order to write from it, so I copied those notes over and over and over again. They’re messy—not at all ordered. But it worked. And I had a hard time switching between voices on a single day. If I spent all day with one character, I couldn’t easily start writing another character until I’d left and come back. It was like becoming the character, and switching too quickly felt…schizophrenic. One thing that really helped ground me was listening to a piece of music a character liked, and imagining her playing it.

  The EnsembleZ: I love that idea, listening to the music a character likes. I’ve noticed that a lot of writers, me included, have very particular preferences about what, if anything, we can listen to while working. Do you have any writing-music needs or aversions or inclinations or?

  AG: I love answers to this question because I love the peek into writers’ processes. Unsurprisingly, I had to listen to a lot of music while writing this novel. I knew most of the pieces pretty well, but I listened to them obsessively when I wrote. What I really did a lot of was watch quartets perform the pieces on YouTube. I would break them down, phrase-by-phrase sometimes, to see which moments I wanted to dramatize. But normally, I can’t listen to anything when I write. Not even music without words. I think I need to hear the music of the words I’m writing too much to listen to anything else. The single piece I’ve been able to write to is Keith Jarrett’s version of Handel Suites for Keyboard. Have you heard them? There’s something very simple and quaint (thought not at all, really) that makes space in my brain. I’ve also basically memorized them, so I barely hear them anymore. What do you listen to?

  Z: Shostakovich’s quartets have been really helpful. Arvo Pärt’s a reliable writing companion, as is Fetty Wap. I wonder if you can talk more about any of these phrase-by-phrase dramatizations, how you picked what. I love coming across fiction that really delves into the details of making music—as yours does, of course—and there isn’t much of it, I think. (I’ve read the closing pages of Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” fifty times, maybe.)

  AG: “Sonny’s Blues” is one of those stories that keeps teaching and teaching, no matter how many times you read it, right? I think the end of that story was a huge model for me in terms of how you can really break language down and rebuild it during a moment of musical ecstasy. In order to get there, for me, I had to break down the actual music first. I would find a part in the piece I wanted to write about that represented the emotional moment I wanted to communicate for the characters. So I’d watch various quartets play that particular part of the movement. Let’s say it’s the first climax, a fortissimo. I would watch how the first violinist cued, how she moved and breathed, and who imitated her, who responded physically and how. From there, I borrowed, stole, and imagined. Then I did that for each character at crucial phrases throughout the pieces.

  At a higher level, though, choosing which pieces to highlight was a bit less arduous. I tried to match up the pieces I chose to the general emotional swell I was writing about. So in the beginning, when the group is new, they play a piece that straddles the student and professional line, Dvroak’s “American.” And when there’s some serious sturm and drang in the group’s relationships, they are, of course, playing Shostakovich, king of turmoil. And when there’s a movement towards major transition, they expand with the Mendelssohn Octet. Because I’d studied them and played them, these pieces already existed for me as totems, emotional stories. That’s the great discovery I made when writing: that I’d already been telling myself musical stories for years and years.

  By the way, I love you mentioned Arvo Pärt in the same sentence as Fetty Wap, both of which I totally subscribe to. Pärt has a really beautiful (and difficult) piece for eight celli that I once had the privilege of playing and that I recommend if you don’t know it already.

  Z: You and I share an editor. We’ve talked a little about how we lucked out in that respect. What was the editing process like for you?

  AG: It’s such a strange process, being edited, but I can’t imagine someone with a more gentle or intuitive touch than our editor, Laura [Perciasepe]. She was editing something small I wrote recently, and the way she saw so clearly what it wanted to be, before I’d even realized it myself, and guided me toward that—well, it’s masterful. I’ve seen how much of a particular skill editing is. It’s often hard for me to temper the place of dreaming that writing comes from to be able to see with an editing brain. And especially with this novel, which was really complex with so many characters who are always interacting with each other over huge spans of time. The textures of their relationship had to change in believable ways, but also things had to click together logistically. She was really good about pointing out places where the logistical bottom kind of fell out, or where I was moving toward an emotional moment but not quite there. It’s quite intimate, being edited. She learned my writing inside out, which felt very vulnerable. It’s not so far removed from the way a quartet member might learn another member’s cueing breaths and musical interpretations. But that’s where the trust is seeded and grown, I think. Letting an editor really understand your sentences and live them as if they were her own. It only got better with that expansion.

  R.O. Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, is forthcoming from Riverhead in July. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, Noon, Time, Electric Literature, Playboy, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere.

  THIS ENTRY WAS POSTED IN NEWS AND TAGGED AJA GABEL, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, CLASSICAL MUSIC, FICTION, JAMES BALDWIN, MUSIC, NOVEL, Q&A, R.O. KWON, THE ENSEMBLE. BOOKMARK THE PERMALINK.

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Print Marked Items
Gabel, Aja: THE ENSEMBLE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Gabel, Aja THE ENSEMBLE Riverhead (Adult Fiction) $26.00 5, 15 ISBN: 978-0-7352-1476-7
Eighteen years in the musical careers and emotional lives of the members of a string quartet.
"Jana and Henry met at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where they'd both been excellent
soloists....She'd once witnessed him sight-read Stravinsky on violin while nearly blind drunk, and play it
more flawlessly and beautifully than she ever could on a first go." Then Jana and Henry meet Brit and
Daniel, and the Van Ness Quartet is born. Gabel's debut opens on the eve of the group's competition for a
career-making fellowship in the Canadian Rockies. In a desperate bid to ensure their success, Jana, a girl
with an alcoholic mother and a rough upbringing, sleeps with one of the judges. Rotating among the
perspectives of the four musicians--Jana, the driven; Henry, the prodigy; Daniel and Brit, the on-again, offagain
lovers--we follow the group as they mature as musicians and adults. Not much ever happens, but what
little does is analyzed in microscopic detail, via page after page of exposition. For example, Brit and Jana
share a comforting embrace. "It occurred to Jana perhaps for the first time why men loved Brit--why people
loved Brit: she was able, in a way that most people weren't, to give and receive goodwill. In Jana's whole
life, she could not recall ever having been hugged like this. This one was all-encompassing compassion.
Brit was an equal planet to Jana, and the two of them were temporarily merging, gravities combining." So
much effort to make this unimportant moment important, and to so little effect! On and on it goes--
sometimes it feels as if one is reading the author's notes for the book rather than the book itself.
An accomplished rendering of the competitive world of classical music helps balance the less-elegant
handling of the characters' emotional lives.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Gabel, Aja: THE ENSEMBLE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650869/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c270ac47.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
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THE ENSEMBLE
Arlene Mckanic
BookPage.
(May 2018): p20.
COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
THE ENSEMBLE
By Aja Gabel
Riverhead $26, 352 pages ISBN 9780735214767 Audio, eBook available
Do you ever wonder what people who play in string quartets are really like? When they come onstage, they
seem so ascetic in their concert blacks. Surely, this quality extends to their personal lives. If they are old
enough to be married, they must have tidy, quietly happy unions. I must admit to these prejudices, which I
didn't even know I had. So I was shocked when the chief violinist of an ensemble pulls out a cigarette and
lights up in the opening pages of Aja Gabel's brilliant, groundbreaking novel--and then the violinist boinks
one of the judges of an upcoming contest and tries to blackmail him.
The message: People in elegant string quartets are just as messed up as everybody else.
In the case of Gabel's quartet, they're probably even more messed up than everybody else. There's brittle
Jana; orphaned, sad Brit; bitter Daniel; and rackety, sweet-natured Henry, the youngest and most talented.
The Ensemble follows them from ambitious youth to resigned middle age, through hookups and breakups,
marriage and children, lonely hotel rooms and crummy apartments. The four characters may not like each
other, but they love each other. They are, to their surprise, a family.
Gabel, a musician herself, knows this world intimately. An alarm rings in B-flat, a note one character
particularly hates. Their instruments leave marks on them in the form of bruises, divots, "violin hickies" and
bad backs, as well as tendonitis--a mere inconvenience to a civilian but destructive for a string musician's
career. Each chapter relates the point of view of one of the musicians, and each section opens with a list of
musical pieces that the reader might listen to while reading.
No other novel is quite like The Ensemble.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mckanic, Arlene. "THE ENSEMBLE." BookPage, May 2018, p. 20. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537055048/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8aa61980.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
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The Ensemble
Poornima Apte
Booklist.
114.17 (May 1, 2018): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* The Ensemble.
By Aja Gabel.
May 2018. 352p. Riverhead, $26 (9780735214767).
Michael Tilson, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, calls the great symphonies
"architectures of time," encapsulating the insights of a lifetime; they are astonishing works that span anger
and pure joy. This description also applies to former cellist Gabel's stunningly resonant debut performance.
Her novel runs the gamut of human emotions, from envy to sorrow, joy, pain, terror, and frustration, as it
follows the lives of the talented musicians, Jana, Brit, Daniel, and Henry, in a string quartet, the Van Ness.
With remarkable assurance, Gabel takes the four through their shaky early performances and expertly ties
their individual and collective lives together with generous doses of empathy. The singular motif that rises
above all else is the encroachment of time, the ways in which we are forced to fine tune our lives to a pitch
we can make peace with. "Time looked different when you were young, and whatever foolishness you
engaged in was undiluted--there was always the possibility that the next promised moment would carry you
somewhere else, always the possibility of more flames, more beats, more life. Time, when you were older,
was something different, irregular." A virtuoso performance.--Poornima Apte
YA: The manner with which the young musicians navigate their early struggles and successes will likely
resonate with many teen readers, particularly aspiring musicians. PA.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Apte, Poornima. "The Ensemble." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 61. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647367/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1807446a.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A539647367
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The Ensemble
Publishers Weekly.
265.11 (Mar. 12, 2018): p36.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Ensemble
Aja Gabel. Riverhead, $26 (352p) ISBN 978-0-7352-1476-7
Gabel's wonderful debut centers on the talented members of the Van Ness String Quartet over the course of
the 18 event-filled years following 1994. There's Jana, violin 1, the natural leader; Henry, viola, the prodigy;
Daniel, cello, the charming one who brings intensity to the group; and Brit, violin 2, the unknown quantity.
They've slept with one another (Jana and Henry, Daniel and Brit) and are battered and bruised by the
competition circuit. But, over the years, they stay together in the face of professional temptations (Henry is
encouraged to make a solo recital debut), dueling egos (Jana incurs Henry's jealousy when she sleeps with
another violinist), rivalries (Daniel is intimidated by the members of a younger quartet), injuries, and bad
judgment. Along the way, they also manage to become husbands, wives, and parents. But despite all these
distractions, the love of making music is what keeps Jana and the others imperfectly bound to one another.
Seldom has a novel managed to better dramatize the particular pressures that make up the life of a
professional musician, from the physical pain of contorting limbs over a long period of time to the
emotional stress of constantly making adjustments to the changing temperaments of partners. Readers will
come away with a renewed appreciation for things people usually take for granted when listening to music.
The four characters are individually memorable, but as a quartet they're unforgettable. Agent: Andrea
Morrison, Writers House. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Ensemble." Publishers Weekly, 12 Mar. 2018, p. 36. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531285075/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1d78ab55.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531285075
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What Were READING: Our roundup of
the must-reads hitting our bookshelves
this month BY SAMANTHA IRBY
Samantha Irby
Marie Claire.
25.5 (May 2018): p107.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Hearst Communications. Reprinted with permission of Hearst.
http://www.hearst.com
Full Text:
1. THE ENSEMBLE
by Aja Gabel (Riverhead)
This lilting, richly detailed story follows a group of friends--also a string quartet--as they grow and change
together throughout adulthood. Told from alternating perspectives, it gives us a riveting look inside the
world of classical musicians and an intimate study of friendships as they wax and wane over the course of a
lifetime.
2. THE PISCES
by Melissa Broder (Hogarth)
What begins as a tale of a woman grappling with a recent breakup and existential inertia winds its way to an
unexpected interspecies love affair. Expect (quite literally) messy and thrilling consequences. Broder
delivers her signature hilarity, intelligence, and spot-on examination of the human (et al.) condition.
3. THAT KIND OF MOTHER
by Rumaan Alam (Ecco)
What makes a mother? A family? How much (if at all) can love mitigate the crushing inequities of race,
class, and privilege? Alam explores these questions with exquisite tenderness, palpable detail, and
excruciating empathy in a story of two mothers, two babies, and the ways in which their lives intertwine.
4. YOU ME EVERYTHING
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by Catherine Isaac (Pamela Dorman Books)
Jess left her disinterested, cheating boyfriend within months after giving birth to their child and never
looked back. Ten years later, to honor her mother's dying wish, Jess travels to reconnect her son with his
father. Equal parts wry comedy and touching family drama, it's ultimately a total heartbreaker that'll stay
with you long after you're done.
5. THE FAVORITE SISTER
by Jessica Knoll (Simon & Schuster)
Picture a fictional feminist reality TV show that's basically The Real Housewives of Startup Boardrooms.
We find out early that one of the five castmates is dead, but we have no idea who did it, or why. This is the
kind of soapy, hilariously vicious book you'll gobble up in one sitting.
6. THE PERFECT MOTHER
by Aimee Molloy (Harper)
A group of friends, all moms, decide one summer night to let loose at a bar to get a break from the tears and
the feedings and the endless pressure. While they're out, one of the babies is abducted. What follows is a
desperate, thrilling mystery that you'll think you have all figured out--until you realize you don't.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Irby, Samantha. "What Were READING: Our roundup of the must-reads hitting our bookshelves this month
BY SAMANTHA IRBY." Marie Claire, May 2018, p. 107. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540001420/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f96716fe.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540001420

Perkins, Christine
Source:
Library Journal. 3/1/2018, Vol. 143 Issue 4, p74-74. 1/6p.
Document Type:
Book Review
★Gabel, Aja. The Ensemble. Riverhead. May 2018. 352p. ISBN 9780735214767. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780735214781. F

DEBUT It's the 1990s, and four up-andcoming musicians at a San Francisco conservatory decide to forgo solo careers in favor of forming a string quartet. For Jana, the driven and motivated first violin, it's the realization that she's always been most engaged and creatively challenged when playing with others. Henry, a childhood viola prodigy, is compelled by his loyalty and deep friendship with Jana. Brit, the sweet and sympathetic second violin, feels like she wasted her time attending a "regular college" instead of a music school. The cellist, Daniel, nearly 30, has been toiling laboriously, waiting for the stars to align. Gabel's first novel explores the ups and downs of their chamber group, the Van Ness Quartet, as their relationships and talents grow and mature. Each character is fully developed, each action and emotion is believable and relatable. VERDICT Like a talented, well-rehearsed quartet, this is the epitome of gestalt and lyricism. Gabel explores friendship and art with great warmth, humanity, and wisdom. Each of the four parts begins with a selection of chamber music pieces that make a wonderful and fitting aural backdrop. [See Prepub Alert, 11/27/17; "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/1/18.]

"Gabel, Aja: THE ENSEMBLE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650869/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 23 June 2018. Mckanic, Arlene. "THE ENSEMBLE." BookPage, May 2018, p. 20. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537055048/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 23 June 2018. Apte, Poornima. "The Ensemble." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 61. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647367/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 23 June 2018. "The Ensemble." Publishers Weekly, 12 Mar. 2018, p. 36. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531285075/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 23 June 2018. Irby, Samantha. "What Were READING: Our roundup of the must-reads hitting our bookshelves this month BY SAMANTHA IRBY." Marie Claire, May 2018, p. 107. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540001420/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 23 June 2018.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2018/05/the-ensemble-by-aja-gabel/
  Word count: 1352

  TO CHOOSE MUSIC: AJA GABEL’S THE ENSEMBLE
  REVIEWED BY TAJJA ISEN

  May 9th, 2018

  My parents put me in piano lessons long before I could understand the nature of commitment. At age four, I was a tiny dilettante who left a stream of after-school classes in my wake—ballet, gymnastics, swimming—but piano was the thing that somehow stuck. The only major hiccup came about twelve years in, when I reached the watershed moment that dictated how much of my life I’d keep giving to the pursuit. Years of being scored on Conservatory exams had taught me that the gradations of skill between musicians could grow pedantically fine. At a certain level, your returns for practice hours become so diminished they’re practically flat, unless you feed your talent with increasingly large slices of life. I took a different road, continuing to practice and play, but without the goal of a musical degree or career. The path I veered away from—pure dedication to the works of the classical masters—is the seed of Aja Gabel’s debut novel, The Ensemble.

  The Ensemble follows four California-based string players, the Van Ness Quartet, over an eighteen-year period that charts their journey through the competitive world of chamber music. The fact of four bodies throws a wrench in the classic arc of the ambition narrative: more than just striving for success, the group must continually work to align their desires, bound by nothing more than the choice to pursue this “webbed, collaborative endeavor.” What makes this link seem even more precarious is how little they have in common as people. There’s a faintly anthropological thrill in watching this unlikely family try to function: Jana, the leader on first violin, is ruthless in seeking to realize her aspirations; romantic Brit hovers behind her on a slightly more ethereal second violin; on viola is Henry, the footloose and confident prodigy; and moody, mournful Daniel rounds things out on cello.

  There’s a fitting alignment between each character’s persona and playing style—Jana’s calculating pursuit of success matches the intensity of her drive to excel as an artist. In a striking opening sequence, we see her use of people as a different kind of instrument, seducing the judge of a musical competition to gain leverage against him. Jana finds both her confidante and her opposite in Henry, who moves through the world with an ease that matches his facility as a violist; one of those men both so entitled and so clueless about it that it’s almost endearing—but not if you ask Daniel, who resents the inverse relationship between Henry’s talent and effort. As a cellist, Daniel is no prodigy: he sees himself as the weakest link in the quartet and approaches his craft with an anxious, melancholic devotion. His is the instrument Gabel herself played when she was still a competitive chamber musician. Of the four, Brit is the least vividly drawn, with her traits condensing a bit too cleanly into type. A dreamy and quiet orphan, she is sometimes at risk of becoming little more than a metaphorical extension of her musical role, as when she is described in a non-musical context as liking to “be the supporting voice, the harmonic line you didn’t know you heard.”

  Music structures the novel at multiple levels, lending The Ensemble both a form and language. Divided into four parts, each portion cycles through the voices of two or three characters in a manner akin to musical solos. The exception comes any time that the quartet is performing, at which point they are so attuned to one another that the narration reaches a state of omniscience. Gabel treats these scenes of playing with a skillful lightness: rather than dwelling on musical descriptions, the tableau of performance becomes a tense, even erotic space where four people, engaged in this act of intimacy, try (and fail) to read one another through the music.

  The vocabulary of music is also woven into the novel’s diction, but with patchier success. While transposing the language of music into different contexts can offer moments of unexpected beauty—seen when a woman in sexual ecstasy is “held loosely in that place between triple forte and unbridled chaos”—Gabel’s overreliance on the trope can also result in inscrutable images (as when Jana and Henry, both proud and lonely, are described as pushing their “stubborn fermatas… against each other”) or banal platitudes (“People are so much music.”)

  In the world of professional musicianship, the deck is stacked against the ensemble as a form: if you’re talented enough, a solo career is the expected next step. If you’re too talented, people will try to poach you out of chamber music entirely (as happens with Henry). The figure of the ensemble becomes both case study and metaphor for the general enigma of relationships. What makes people choose one another? What sustains that choice across decades, tensions, and indiscretions? For the Van Ness Quartet, the decision is about—at least initially—naked ambition. The energy between them inhabits the uncanny timbre between intimate and alien: though these people are “as ingrained in each other’s daily lives as significant others,” they have only chosen one another “to get closer to some quality they didn’t naturally possess”—shaky ground on which to build your bonds, but also a nod to the “lived contract” that lurks at the heart of most relationships and chosen families.

  This is where the novel truly shines—in its musings on the glue that binds the group. Gabel peppers physical descriptions with moments of telling uncertainty: the implication that, despite spending years watching one another for the briefest physical cue—a bend of the wrist, a hitch of the breath—there’s some absent core of true comprehension. Their bodies are “at once familiar and unfamiliar to each other.” Though playing music might require a cultivated intimacy, it’s also not a proxy for the real thing. As Brit stares longingly at Daniel, her on-again-off-again romantic partner, from across the rehearsal hall, she laments the “shattering” truth that “[t]his was it, all she would have of him… just this collection of mechanics.” It’s another reason why this quartet relationship is a sketchy investment—you can commit your entire life to it before one day realizing, as Daniel does, that you have “made nothing else.”

  Music, at this stratum, is a harsh mistress. The question of family-making beyond the quartet is one that each character must face, struggling for balance between pure artistry and the messy realities of a life. The tension between artistic success and “having it all” finds its most nuanced rendering with Henry. As the most talented among them, his desire to start a family with his former student Kimiko—causing her to lose years of her career as a promising violinist—is experienced by the quartet as a kind of affront. There’s a link between the purity of one’s potential and the perceived size of the loss when it’s “tainted” by the outside world. To choose life, then, is only to urge along the terrifying truth of elite musicianship: that the materials with which you work—time, breath, your body and those of others—will ultimately turn against you.

  Like the best narratives of ambition, The Ensemble offers its readers the chance to breathe the rarefied air of an elite pursuit. But there’s no schadenfreude here—more than just conveying the scandalous thrill of seeing what it takes to make it, Gabel’s sensitive depiction of relationships tempers that thrill with the poignancy of loss and the recognition that success often requires the pruning out of what is most meaningful.

  Tajja Isen is a Toronto-based writer and voice actor. A contributing editor at Catapult, her work has also appeared in Electric Literature, Shondaland, Bitch, and Book Riot. More from this author →

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