Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: School of Velocity
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.ericbeckrubin.com/
CITY: Toronto
STATE: ON
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2016119447 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2016119447 |
| HEADING: | Rubin, Eric Beck |
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| 001 | 10250957 |
| 005 | 20160907075048.0 |
| 008 | 160906n| azannaabn |n aaa c |
| 010 | __ |a no2016119447 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca10571208 |
| 040 | __ |a CaBVa |b eng |e rda |c CaBVa |
| 100 | 1_ |a Rubin, Eric Beck |
| 374 | __ |a Novelists |2 lcsh |
| 670 | __ |a School of velocity, 2016: |b title page (Eric Beck Rubin) about the author (a cultural historian who writes on architecture, literature and psychology; this is his first fiction; lives in Toronto) |
| 670 | __ |a Amicus, viewed Sept. 1, 2016: |b (access point: Rubin, Eric Beck; usage: Eric Beck Rubin; Canadian) |
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and cultural historian. Professor of architecture and design, University of Toronto.
AWARDS:Frank Hegyi Award finalist, for School of Velocity.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
University of Toronto professor Eric Beck Rubin’s debut novel is School of Velocity. The story tells of two friends, Jan and Dirk, who grow up as musical prodigies in the Netherlands. “The world of talented youth is a captivating backdrop for their story. More interesting in many ways than those who actually reach the top, both Jan and Dirk almost make it,” wrote Sarah Gilmartin in the Irish Times. “Jan wins a prestigious scholarship at the de Vroot Conservatory, but while he is in high demand, it is as an accompanist … that he eventually makes his name.” “His soaring progress is cut short however, when he begins to experience auditory hallucinations,” explained Grace O’Connell in the introduction to an interview with Rubin on the Open Book website. Jan “is having difficulty performing, with a horrendous problem, in that he can hear any discordant music, or just in fact horrid noise, when in the wings waiting to perform, and never the score he is due to follow,” declared John Lloyd on the Book Bag website. “The devil’s tinnitus, you might call it.” “The hallucinations do more than rob him of his musical destiny, however,” O’Connell continued; “they unlock a flood of memories around his childhood best friend, Dirk.” “On the back of many offers,” Gilmartin continued, “Dirk heads to America to fulfil his acting dreams. After a few visits back to Holland, he vanishes into the ether, sending enigmatic postcards from all over the world.”
Critics found Rubin’s debut intriguing. “In School of Velocity, his first work of fiction, Rubin impresses at almost every turn,” asserted Timothy Niedermann in the Ottawa Review of Books. “His writing is entertaining and inventive. The scenes are often vivid, with fascinating, unpredictable details. The description of Jan’s playing and his relationship to music is particularly captivating. The reader is totally immersed into the passion of musical performance.” “For much of School of Velocity, Rubin eschews the obvious; Jan’s relationship with Dirk defies easy categorization,” stated Jade Colbert in the Toronto Globe & Mail. “Rubin loses that restraint in the end, giving over to more romantic extremes, but this debut shows he’s a talent to watch.” “Rubin writes with grace and exactitude,” opined Diana Evans in the London Guardian, “giving a tangible, animated quality to the sensual world of his story. We can almost hear those piano keys, ‘jabbing and undercutting, hiding and pouncing.’ ‘There’s this mist of violas and cello on one side, and a swarm of violins on the other,’ Jan enthuses when trying to convince Dirk of the merits of one of his favourite works.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Financial Times, December 9, 2016, review of School of Velocity.
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), August 27, 2016, Jade Colbert, “Debuts,” p. R14.
Guardian (London, England), December 10, 2016, Diana Evans, review of School of Velocity.
Irish Times, November 26, 2016, Sarah Gilmartin, review of School of Velocity.
Publishers Weekly, April 23, 2018, review of School of Velocity, p. 61.
ONLINE
Book Bag, http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/ (September 5, 2018), John Lloyd, review of School of Velocity.
Eric Beck Rubin website, http://www.ericbeckrubin.com/ (September 5, 2018), author profile.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (June 26, 2018), André van Loon, “Elegant, Tragic, Strange: Eric Beck Rubin’s ‘School of Velocity.'”
Open Book, http://open-book.ca/ (August 24, 2016), Grace O’Connell, “The Entitled Interview with Eric Beck Rubin.”
Ottawa Review of Books, https://www.ottawareviewofbooks.com/ (June 7, 2017), Timothy Niedermann, review of School of Velocity.
THE AUTHOR
ERIC BECK RUBIN is a cultural historian who writes on architecture, literature, and psychology. School of Velocity is his first novel and he is currently at work on a second: a family saga spanning pre-World War II Germany to present-day Los Angeles and Western Canada.
Photo by Scott Norsworthy
Photo by Scott Norsworthy
For novel-related news, events and appearances, see www.facebook.com/EricBeckRubin.
For further information about Eric's academic and related activites, click here.
For representation, publicity and personal contacts, click here.
Eric is also the creator of the Burning Books Literary Podcast, which can be found on iTunes and Litopia.
School of Velocity
Publishers Weekly.
265.17 (Apr. 23, 2018): p61. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"School of Velocity." Publishers Weekly, 23 Apr. 2018, p. 61. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532869/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=d98eb775. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532869
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DEBUTS
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada).
(Aug. 27, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: pR14. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 The Globe and Mail Inc.
http://www.globeandmail.com
Full Text:
Byline: JADE COLBERT
School of Velocity By Eric Beck Rubin, Doubleday, 208 pages, $29.95
Jan de Vries hallucinates discord: circular saws, speaker feedback, low moans, clashing music - an uproar that isn't there. This is personally troubling but also professionally calamitous for concert pianist Jan, which is why the opening to Eric Beck Rubin's novel is so striking, because Jan's reaction isn't what you might expect. Standing in the wings at a concert hall, he's detached, almost willing his own ruin; when it comes, he experiences it as a kind of ecstasy. Days after his downfall, he drives home to the small town in the south Netherlands where he grew up. Why he goes there has to do with his relationship with his best friend 30 years before. For much of School of Velocity, Rubin eschews the obvious; Jan's relationship with Dirk defies easy categorization. Rubin loses that restraint in the end, giving over to more romantic extremes, but this debut shows he's a talent to watch.
Beautiful Country By J.R. Thornton, Harper Perennial, 320 pages, $19.99
If you haven't had enough highperformance sport this month, J.R. Thornton's debut novel, set in China five years before the Beijing Olympics, might be for you. Chase, a 14-year-old New England tennis star with aspirations to the pro circuit, is pulled out of school after the death of his older brother, and sent to Beijing to train with the city's elite boys' team. His father's reasons for sending Chase to Beijing are initially unclear, but it becomes increasingly obvious that Chase is a pawn in a larger game. Chase's predicament offers a unique window for an American perspective on China. Thornton is careful to highlight the limits of that perspective, and for the most part it works, though Chase's narration sometimes strains credibility, coming off as more mature than his years. Still, this is a thoughtful, often touching tale about modern China and American interest in the country that does not look away from some of its harsh realities.
Here Comes the Sun By Nicole Dennis-Benn, Liveright, 336 pages, $35.95
Don't let George Harrison (or Nina Simone or Peter Tosh) fool you: The sun might be coming, but all's not right. Nicole DennisBenn's debut, set on Jamaica's northern coast, 1994, is about the shadows - dispossession, exploitation, bigotry, neglect - an ironic juxtaposition with the cheerful melody playing in the title. River Bank has a beach but "This is no paradise," Margot, a manager at a Montego Bay resort, tells a friend. Margot would know: at an early age she learned to trade sex for survival, a sacrifice she continues to make after-hours at the resort to put her teenage
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sister, Thandi, through school. For Margot and her mother, Delores, Thandi - a gifted student - is their ticket out of poverty (they expect her to become a doctor) but at her prestigious school Thandi sees other barriers (colour, class) to making it. A complex, realist depiction of sexuality and desperation in Jamaica that leaves readers no easy resolution.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"DEBUTS." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 27 Aug. 2016, p. R14. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A461697633/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=9d27a9b8. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461697633
3 of 3 8/12/18, 3:21 PM
School of Velocity review: notes on a friendship
A classical pianist looks back on his life in Eric Beck Rubin’s short, meditative novel
Sarah Gilmartin
Sat, Nov 26, 2016, 05:00
First published:
Sat, Nov 26, 2016, 05:00
Book Title:
School of Velocity
ISBN-13:
9780993506277
Author:
Eric Beck Rubin
Publisher:
ONE
Guideline Price:
£12.99
Since 2013, Pushkin Press’s imprint ONE and its editor, Elena Lappin, have unearthed quite a few gems of debuts. Issuing one title a season, more often than not a new voice, it has brought us the likes of Chigozie Obioma’s Booker-shortlisted The Fishermen, Rachel Elliott’s Baileys-nominated Whispers Through the Megaphone and, earlier this year, the American writer Ted McDermott’s darkly droll debut, The Minor Outsider.
The latest is Eric Beck Rubin’s School of Velocity, a meditation on music, memory and mental illness. From his Maastricht home, 40-something Jan de Vries charts his career as a classical pianist, centring the tale on a formidable friendship forged as a teenager.
Jan notices Dirk around their creative arts school in Den Bosch long before he meets him. A larger-than-life presence, Dirk is a handsome and charismatic teenager whom girls flock to and boys hope to be. Forgiving the theft of his girlfriend, Lise – soon discarded by Dirk– Jan becomes inseparable from his new friend, following him home after school and sleeping over in a largely parentless house.
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The Isle of WightWaiting for Grace’s Day to dawn
The painful intensity of the bond comes alive through Jan’s descriptions. It is reflected in the title, which refers to the classical piano manual for practicing scales, but also in Dirk and Jan’s game of riding their bikes at speed downhill with their eyes closed.
Fantasies of escape
As Jan watches Dirk hog the limelight, longing to have him alone, there are overtones of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley. Like the flamboyant Dickie Greenleaf, Dirk is a vibrant presence, always teetering on the edge. Jan summaries his attitude: “Living life outside the bounds was worth it. Squeezing excitement out of every moment no matter where it led you, no matter what calamity it brought down, was worth it. Was the whole point.”
Sharp and funny, Dirk teases Jan with grand fantasies of escape: “Or maybe, de Vries, we shouldn’t go to school tomorrow. Eh? Maybe fly away to Paris instead. Or Mombasa. Or Kinshasa. Or Lake Titicaca.” A talented young actor with grand ambitions, Dirk’s greatest role is himself. Planning a show that will take the school by storm, he tells Jan: “It’ll be a demonstration of pure Dirkian nonsense.” That their friendship quickly turns sexual is not surprising. Told from Jan’s perspective, it is Dirk who controls the action, while Jan acquiesces to whatever the dominant personality wants.
The world of talented youth is a captivating backdrop for their story. More interesting in many ways than those who actually reach the top, both Jan and Dirk almost make it. Jan wins a prestigious scholarship at the de Vroot Conservatory, but while he is in high demand, it is as an accompanist not a soloist that he eventually makes his name. On the back of many offers, Dirk heads to America to fulfil his acting dreams. After a few visits back to Holland, he vanishes into the ether, sending enigmatic postcards from all over the world, leading Jan to believe his star continues to shine.
The turning point in the novel, and the friendship, comes with the arrival of Lena, a law student Jan falls for while training at the conservatory. Rubin depicts her as a faithful and steady presence, her commitment to nurturing the artist making for an admirable if somewhat dull female character. She is the opposite of Dirk – selfless, supportive, sympathetic – though as Jan waits to go on stage in Osaka for his first international tour, it is Dirk who he imagines in the audience, his ideal listener. The upending in later chapters of how we see their friendship is clever, though the storyline of Jan succumbing to mental illness warrants further exploration.
Musical backdrop
From Canada, Rubin is a cultural historian who writes on architecture, literature and psychology. School of Velocity started to take shape while he was on a language study course at the Regina Coeli school, in Vught, in the Netherlands. His knowledge of and research into classical music is impressive and lends an eloquence to Jan’s commentary, which is authentic and interesting: “The Schubert had the most beautiful opening of any piece I had played. As if the notes were balanced on the thinnest, most fragile wire.” The Rachmaninov C-sharp is “a pack of limbs falling spectacularly down a flight of stairs”.
Using music as a backdrop in fiction has resulted in some excellent novels, from Bernard MacLaverty’s Booker shortlisted Grace Notes to Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. The subjects of music and friendship at the heart of Rubin’s debut don’t quite converge in a similar fashion, with a final quarter that is disjointed and includes a questionable shift of tense and voice.
School of Velocity makes for a very pleasant interlude nonetheless. Rubin has succeeded in his short novel, as Jan himself puts it, “to conceive of a piece as a story, and of composers as storytellers with specific voices, cadences, personalities”.
The Entitled Interview with Eric Beck Rubin
Date
August 24, 2016
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Eric Beck Rubin Entitled Interview
Eric Beck Rubin's School of Velocity (Doubleday Canada) marks the arrival of a talented new voice in CanLit.
The novel follows Jan de Vries, whose virtuoso talent at the piano promised him a stunning career. His soaring progress is cut short however, when he begins to experience auditory hallucinations. The hallucinations do more than rob him of his musical destiny, however; they unlock a flood of memories around his childhood best friend, Dirk.
As the pressure of the hallucinations drive Jan to action, a stunning story of friendship, obsession, and lifelong love is slowly revealed through Rubin's arresting prose.
We're pleased to welcome Eric to Open Book today to discuss School of Velocity as part of our Entitled interview series. Eric tells us about the mysterious stranger who supplied his memorable title, describes the function of a title in onomatopoeic form, and tips his hat to the iconic British author who's created many of his own favourite titles.
Open Book:
Tell us about the title of your newest book and how you came to it.
Eric Beck Rubin:
My agent is in a bar, describing the plot of the novel to an editor. What’s the novel called, the editor asks. An old man breaks into the conversation. “There is a series of piano exercises by Carl Czerny called ‘School of Velocity’.”
The exercises are used to warm up the fingers before practicing or performance. Most of them are played at sharply increasing speeds, mixing repetition and variation — all elements of the plot of the story. The old man walks out of the bar and is never heard from again. Everything in this story is true.
OB:
What, in your opinion, is most important function of a title?
EBR:
A title has got to be understood literally and metaphorically. Boom — it hits you. Hiss — it lingers.
OB:
What is your favourite title that you've ever come up with and why? (For any kind of piece, short or long.)
EBR:
“Dresden/Dresden” is the title of an article I wrote about visiting that city. I thought I was going to see the moonscape of Slaughterhouse-Five and many post-bombing pictures, but what I saw was the city as it existed before the destruction. I could not believe my eyes. The piece was published in Descant’s ‘Hidden Cities’ issue.
OB:
What about your favourite title as a reader, from someone else's work?
EBR:
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson. It sounds like an expression you must once have heard somewhere, but is entirely the author’s creation. Winterson’s follow-up to that novel was her memoirs, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? Obviously she’s on fire.
OB:
Did you consider any other titles for your current book and if so what were they? Why did you decide to go with the title you eventually picked?
EBR:
Once the old man broke into my agent, Andy’s, life, there could be no other titles. No titles before. No titles after.
OB:
What are you working on now?
EBR:
I’m well into my second novel, which is about two brothers, Alec and Harry — fraternal twins, diametric opposites, closely bound through life.
Eric Beck Rubin is a professor of Architecture and Design at the University of Toronto, and this novel is his first foray into fiction. He is currently at work on a second novel: an ambitious, multi-voiced family saga spanning several generations, from pre-World War II Germany to present-day New York and Canada. The author lives in Toronto, Canada.
Grace O'Connell is the Contributing Editor for Open Book: Toronto and the author of Magnified World (Random House Canada). She also writes a book column for This Magazine.
For more information about Magnified World please visit the Random House Canada website.
Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
School of Velocity by Eric Beck Rubin
School of Velocity by Eric Beck Rubin
0993506275.jpg
Buy School of Velocity by Eric Beck Rubin at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Literary Fiction
Rating: 4.5/5
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Reviewed by John Lloyd
Summary: This author promises much with his debut novel, even if he does throw in a free excuse for you not liking it. Get past that potentially major hindrance and this is most memorable.
Buy? Yes Borrow? Yes
Pages: 224 Date: November 2016
Publisher: One
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9780993506277
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Jan's head is dropping him in it. He's a trained concert pianist, but is having difficulty performing, with a horrendous problem, in that he can hear any discordant music, or just in fact horrid noise, when in the wings waiting to perform, and never the score he is due to follow. The devil's tinnitus, you might call it. With another failure behind him, but dignity somewhat intact, Jan decides he has to work back through his life to tell us the cause – and we're likewise dropped into an extended flashback, to his formative years at art school, with a pretentious drama student, Dirk. The book is a fast-moving exploration of what Jan finds of note (pun intended) through his life, and all that might have caused his mental problem. But is cognisance of what might lie behind it going to help?
I have to go on record as saying I did not like a lot of the first block of this book. And I know who to blame for that – Dirk. My calling him pretentious is but one handicap he had – he's overly boisterous, exuberant, cocky – utterly monkey as we learn at one point, in a great phrase. But what he does can be seen to damage this book a lot, and perhaps irreparably for some. I don't mean so much his character, which I didn't like, nor what the friendship leads to, which is obvious, but in the way we lose Jan in the proceedings. At times he tries to thrust the realism of his Dirk-less days, his rehearsals and studies, on to the pages, but in forsaking so much of what makes Jan interesting we only gain Dirk. There are swathes of this writing, as good as it might be, that makes you cry out for the chance to read about the life of a pianist – the book really does seem mis-sold for many stretches.
But hopefully you latched on to my calling these pages well written, for they really are. Our debutant author might be a professor of architecture in Canada, but he certainly seems to have a head for classical music, and a fine understanding of how people might approach it when learning to perform it. He also drops in phrases from a pilot's vocabulary, just to show his erudition. And all the while he sets everything in The Netherlands, therefore adding one much more unexpected layer onto things, giving a slightly exotic gloss on the banal details of the lads growing up with their immoral fumblings and Velvet Underground long players. Oftentimes you think this is a brilliantly-translated lost European masterpiece.
The Devil's Advocate would say that without the character study of a working pianist, and without the Dutch setting, the book provides little in the long run that is outstandingly new. But to my mind this reads as a brilliant calling-card; many people would suffer in the attempt to convey such elements so well at any stage in their career, let alone as a first-time published author. There's a strong narrative drive here, that makes everything very readable, even if the style and mood can get the writing closer to the 'literary fiction' than the 'general' category at times; there is an authorial conviction about the music I maintain will be beyond the reach of many other writers, and there is an ease with bringing us a complete character that is most commendable. Yes, I hated Dirk (and I grew to hate the blurb, which should be avoided for telling just far too much), but that may well be down to me latching on to Jan so quickly in the initial eight pages – eight pages that, like the rest in this book, are eminently readable.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
The Strays by Emily Bitto has further childhood infatuation.
Buy School of Velocity by Eric Beck Rubin at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy School of Velocity by Eric Beck Rubin at Amazon.co.uk
Buy School of Velocity by Eric Beck Rubin at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy School of Velocity by Eric Beck Rubin at Amazon.com.
School of Velocity by Eric Beck Rubin
June 7, 2017
|
Finalist for the Frank Hegyi Award
Reviewed by Timothy Niedermann
The initial chapter of this debut novel has the narrator, Jan de Vries, a successful piano accompanist, collapsing on-stage during a performance. Then, a few days later, he is packing his bags to leave the apartment where he lives with his wife, who is away at her mother’s, to go “home.” The reader eventually does learn what Jan means by “home,” but why he is doing this is more complicated.
The first half of the book is a long flashback to Jan’s adolescent relationship with his friend Dirk Noosen. They meet in grade 9 at an arts high school—Jan in music (he plays piano), Dirk in theatre, where he directs and acts. They almost immediately become fast friends. The relationship is intense. The two are seldom apart, with Jan often sleeping over at Dirk’s house. But as soon as they head to university they essentially lose contact. Jan stays in the Netherlands, while Dirk chooses to study in the US. After a few years Dirk starts sending an annual postcard from locales all over the world relating his impressive theatrical achievements. But after ten years, those also stop.
Meanwhile Jan has first tried to succeed as a solo performer, but didn’t earn enough to support himself and his wife, Lena. Luckily Lena, a busy lawyer, gladly supported them both. Then at one point, Jan’s agent suggests becoming an accompanist. Jan is at first reluctant to take second billing, but over the years he grows into the role, acting as a stable foundation and frequent guide for the spectacular, but sometimes erratic musicianship of headlining musical performers. Now that he is successful, Jan and Lena live comfortably in the city of Maastricht. His frequent travels mirror her long work hours. The marriage is childless by choice, but mutually adoring. The years pass.
As a musician, Jan’s head is filled with sound constantly. He really no longer needs a score to perform, he remembers so much music. He can recall pieces from the distant past and play them flawlessly. In his forties, though, something changes. Unwanted sounds have begun to intrude into his mind. They start as a distraction, become an annoyance, and now are an affliction. They assault him constantly and have come to interfere with his performances. Their din overwhelms everything else. He cannot hear himself play, whether at rehearsal or, increasingly, in performance. He makes mistakes, a lot of them, and he knows other musicians have noticed. He consults specialists, but they come up with nothing. He hides the truth from Lena as long as he can, but finally has to admit that something is wrong. He simply cannot play anymore.
A chance conversation with an old classmate informs him of Dirk’s current fallen status, from theatre star to schoolteacher. A few months later, Jan decides to find him. The reason is unclear. Is this love? And is this love gay? Is where Dirk lives “home”? Or is this yearning just nostalgia for a simpler time where others took the lead?
Like de Vries, his creator, author Eric Beck Rubin, is a virtuoso. In School of Velocity, his first work of fiction, Rubin impresses at almost every turn. His writing is entertaining and inventive. The scenes are often vivid, with fascinating, unpredictable details. The description of Jan’s playing and his relationship to music is particularly captivating. The reader is totally immersed into the passion of musical performance.
But Rubin is a first-time novelist, and inevitably has his weaknesses. Like many virtuosos, he frequently falls into the trap of letting speed and dexterity subordinate depth and emotion. The reader, like Jan, is caught up in Dirk’s intensity and unpredictability, but occasionally scenes just fly by mechanically, seeming to consist mostly of a listing of activities rather than engagement in them. And despite several very affecting moments throughout the book, the characters remain largely distant. Early on, minor characters appear as essentially just names, while the action flows only around Jan and Dirk. Yet even that intense relationship is presented as a given, not a process, and, for the reader, Jan and Dirk stay at arm’s length.
Given the disparity between their respective home lives and parental attitudes, one might have expected Jan to find a good deal of Dirk’s behaviour off-putting or at least uncomfortable. And certainly the sexual activity, if nothing else, might have created some confusion. But Rubin tends to present the pair’s escapades matter-of-factly, as if Jan didn’t expect anything else. Jan seems to just go with the flow, without reflecting on anything, just letting Dirk take the lead.
Adolescence is a time of active, even obsessive confusion, rebellion, self-absorption, and self-expression. Rubin stands back from that. The reader is given much vivid description and quirky dialogue, but gets little insight into why the friendship is the way it is. Rubin describes what happens but does not have Jan really reflect on what one incident or another means for him personally. Likewise, Dirk himself is a bit of a hyperactive cypher, entertaining, but removed. At one point he thanks Jan for keeping him “on track,” but the reader is as puzzled about the comment as Jan is. At the end, the mature Dirk is a very different person, and one is left wanting to hear him speak about where his life has gone. But the book ends before he can.
These are, of course, quibbles. Rubin is clearly a very talented writer, and there is much in School of Velocity that provokes serious thought as well as entertains. So be forewarned: expectations for his next work are high.
School of Velocity is published by Doubleday Canada.
School of Velocity by Eric Beck Rubin review – music, memory and love
A quiet storm of a novel about the gulf between the openness of youth and the dangerous restraint of middle age
Diana Evans
Sat 10 Dec 2016 04.00 EST
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 07.47 EST
boy piano
‘Now this is music’ … a boy practises the piano. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
There are several pianos in Eric Beck Rubin’s debut novel: a Bösendorfer 280 VC, a Grotrian upright, a 48-inch K-400 upright Kawai. A baby grand walnut Bechstein, manoeuvred by crane through a third-floor apartment window into the practice room of its new owner, Jan de Vries, a haunted virtuoso pianist in decline. Like Jan, the voice of the novel is quiet: it stands back and has secrets. But the music it makes is loud, visceral, cacophonic, terrifying. This is a story about the deafening power of the mind to engulf us when our interior voices are left unheeded.
It is not Chopin’s Preludes or Bach’s Cello Suites that set the tone in Jan’s adolescent friendship with Dirk, who is to haunt him so in adulthood. It is George Clinton, Percy Sledge (“for when you’re with a girl”) and Aaron Neville, of whom Dirk declares, “Now this is music. Soul music. Not that Tchaikovsky ballet quartet shit you’re always playing.” The pair meet in the south Netherlands, where Dirk is a loose-haired, chip-toothed former child actor and all-round people magnet who speaks English “without an accent” and steals Jan’s girlfriend before befriending him. Yet he proves irresistible, a thunderball of a human being to this meek, impressionable village boy with an ear for classical music. Happily assenting to the role of Dirk’s chosen one, Jan becomes his shadow. He rides his bike with his eyes closed for as long as possible to try to beat Dirk’s record. He is schooled in sexual know-how by Dirk’s authoritative hand demonstrations. They spend Christmases at each other’s houses. Late at night sometimes, in the bottom bunk of Dirk’s fantastically untidy bedroom, they spoon each other or watch porn or innocently go further, rendered by Rubin with a wonderful lightness and purity of thought. They are young and untethered. They are the best of friends.
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Dirk and Jan leave high school and have big intentions. “We’re going to be fat,” Dirk says, meaning from success. He goes off to drama school in America, and over the years Jan hears through the grapevine of a world-class one-man show, of Broadway appearances and teaching at the Sorbonne. Jan goes to the finest music academy in the Netherlands and gradually builds a conventional, enviable life as a successful musician: international touring, sell-out shows, a supportive and beautiful wife, the soundproofed practice room into which the baby grand Bechstein floats – but by this time he can hardly play it. He has seen Dirk only once, when he unexpectedly turns up at his music school, and in this lack of Dirk, in his longing for him and his stubborn refusal to answer this longing, a different, more disturbing music begins to emerge inside his head. It mars his performances and appears incurable by medics. He hears “cries of seagulls circling in the air”, a “hammering, metallic tearing”, an impatient car horn, or “a child’s piercing scream”.
Rubin writes with grace and exactitude, giving a tangible, animated quality to the sensual world of his story. We can almost hear those piano keys, “jabbing and undercutting, hiding and pouncing”. “There’s this mist of violas and cello on one side, and a swarm of violins on the other,” Jan enthuses when trying to convince Dirk of the merits of one of his favourite works. And Dirk himself, though at first a cliche of the charismatic, irreverent teen rebel, becomes utterly convincing – most of all through his voice, which is crystal clear and rich in humour. “Or maybe, de Vries, we shouldn’t go to school tomorrow. Eh? Maybe fly away to Paris instead. Or Mombasa. Or Kinshasa. Or Lake Titicaca.” The Dutch landscape is also sharply observed with precise, passing detail, the cobbled roads and tall houses set close to the street, and foods such as chocolate-covered stroopwafels.
Eric Beck Rubin: 'Were my characters enemies? Lovers? I didn’t want to answer'
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Despite his attainment of “fatness” in the wider world, Jan never quite leaves the home he shared with Dirk, and herein lies one of the story’s central tenets. Home is made of someone, of a singular connection of one with another in some fundamental, inchoate part of ourselves, and adult life may occur beyond that as a distortion of a perfect yet formless early music. Both tender and truthful in its evoking of the canyon that lies between the openness of youth and the dangerous restraint of middle age, this is a luminous, quiet storm of a novel that resounds long after its heartbreaking coda.
• Diana Evans’s The Wonder is published by Chatto. School of Velocity is published by One. To order a copy for £10.65 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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reviews
Elegant, Tragic, Strange: Eric Beck Rubin’s “School of Velocity”
By André van Loon
JUNE 26, 2018
ERIC BECK RUBIN’S School of Velocity is a novel about deciding, or even knowing, what the people we desire most really mean to us. It is audacious, reflecting in a subtle but also entirely serious way about who “the other” is, despite thousands of years of literature and philosophy on just this topic. Isn’t it funny, it seems to say, how impossible honesty and knowledge are, never mind a millennium ago, but right now, here, about this person? Is such-and-such a friend, an enemy, someone I idolize or want to sleep with? Do I want all of that at different times, however unspoken it should remain? And why, when I settle on a declaration, does the other respond partially or not at all?
Rubin seems to channel young T. S. Eliot’s style and sensibility, with a fatalistic concern for the unachieved and the myriad ways in which life’s minor tragedies color the whole of experience:
“I have been wondering frequently of late
(But our beginnings never know our ends!)
Why we have not developed into friends.”
I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark
Suddenly, his expression in a glass.
My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.
Whatever we think we know, darkness remains — a wonderful and weighty theme for Rubin to tackle in his debut.
The novel’s plot is simple enough. Jan, a young Dutchman, has his girlfriend stolen by Dirk, a loud schoolmate reminiscent of The Talented Mr. Ripley’s Dickie Greenleaf. Unexpectedly, the pair become best friends, Jan studious and awkward, developing over the years into a concert pianist; Dirk brash and subversive, becoming a gifted theater director and teacher. Girls start to come second in their relationship, until they lose touch and Jan meets Lena, with whom he moves in for a life of erotic and affectionate contentment.
Of course, that is hardly the end of it. We learn that Dirk is no Dickie, his eccentricities masking another reality; and that Jan is sometimes a struggling Ripley, but more often simply a lost man. The questions he can’t leave alone always return to Dirk, not, devastatingly, to Lena, and the longer his riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma continues, the more his composure falters. At the novel’s most memorable moments, he is quite unable to play the piano, an inner acoustic dissonance disturbing him to the core. By the time the men are middle-aged, what had seemed so easy and attractive in their youth turns out to be misremembered, misunderstood, and misguided, making it all the more compelling, if also corrosive, in the present.
Rubin is remarkably accomplished for a first-time novelist, although School of Velocity is not without its faults, one in particular that lingers. On the one hand, the style is self-assured, Jan’s narration mixing the clear and the unclear:
I put my hands to my ears and listened as a circle of music formed around my head. I listened to this circle as if it were a recording. When the recording ended, I went back to playing, this time louder, more aggressively […] I wanted to make a recording that would go on indefinitely, to create a fortress of sound […] Outside it was dark. I was still alone.
Although Jan is not exactly likable, he’s no threat either; nor does Dirk turn out to be either a villain or a saint. The story flows easily from thriller (psychological antagonism), to crime drama (will one of them kill the other?), bildungsroman (boisterous boyhood drifting into unsettled manhood), existentialist musing (alienated men not understanding anything, least of all women), to a tale of infinite regret. And it achieves all this without losing its internal unity, suggesting possible outcomes while concluding in a way that throws the story wide open again.
On the other hand, School of Velocity reads more like a Rachmaninoff prelude than, say, a Tchaikovsky symphony. It is polished and sophisticated, undercut with sufficiently troubling undercurrents to make it more than merely decorative or forgettable. And yet it also tends toward the anticipatory rather than revelatory. It sets a strange relationship before us, and well made though it is, it does not attempt to reorder the world on a grand scale. Of course, this may sound unfair, and in some sense it is: it is as unjust as saying that every composition should have the heart-on-sleeve beauty, intense alienation, and profundity of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6. And yet, one cannot help but feel Rubin himself would value the latter more than the former.
Unfortunately, the novel can tend toward the logical, even clinical. The plot can feel too neat as it unfolds over the years, with its episodes somewhat schematic: Jan surprised by Dirk’s brazen theft of his girlfriend; the pair’s first friendship, meeting of parents, and visits to each other’s houses; the final school year and sudden separation of ways; Jan’s faltering then steady career and relationship with Lena; and finally Jan and Dirk’s peculiar reunion. One thing follows the other as tick follows tock: one never has the impression Jan as narrator, or Rubin as author, will stop and double back, or go deeper when it might seem out of place but nonetheless fascinating. One can forgive faults in structure, if the reason is something intangible or inspired, damn the consequences.
Ultimately, Rubin’s debut invites comparison with the things it sidesteps so carefully. It is easy to imagine the novelist thinking this himself, as though he made himself a promise to go for larger works as soon as he got one success. Such a thought may be easy to disguise, and even though it won’t be found anywhere precisely, it remains everywhere ambiguously. As if, in fact, School of Velocity — elegant, tragic, and strange — knew it could be more, Rubin desiring as much. And yet, in the end, he decided against going too far. One can but hope he will go further, and soon.
¤
André van Loon is a writer and literary critic. He lives in London and is at work on his first novel.
School of Velocity
By Eric Beck Rubin
Published 06.26.2018
ONE / Pushkin
224 Pages
FICTION
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School of Velocity by Eric Beck Rubin review — past loves and lost innocence
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Rebecca Liu December 9, 2016
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Jan de Vries is a virtuoso pianist at the height of his career. Based in Maastricht with his loving wife Lena, he enjoys critically acclaimed tours around the world. Lately, however, he’s been hearing strange sounds in his head. These episodes threaten his career, and make him reflect on his childhood friendship with his schoolmate Dirk, an effervescent and mysterious thespian.
Cultural historian Eric Beck Rubin’s debut novel is an elegant synaesthetic tale in which memories of past loves and lost innocence are narrated alongside soundscapes of de Vries’s musical repertoire. The title, we learn, refers to a piano training score by 19th-century Austrian composer Carl Czerny, whose experiments in tempo reflect the movement of Rubin’s book as it hurtles towards its bittersweet ending. De Vries’s final confrontation with Dirk is a tragic, Gatsby-like meditation on the impossibility of reliving the past, however much we cling to our memories.
School of Velocity, by Eric Beck Rubin, ONE, RRP£12.99, 224 pages
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