Blues for Papa

About the Book

Blues for Papa is in a sense everyone's story, about how we must fight to free ourselves... to be ourselves; it's about concert pianist David Skolovsky's struggle to find himself and walk his own path in music, after growing up in the shadow of his autocratic, world-renowned pianist father Artur Skolovsky.

As the book opens, David, 29, is at a crisis point in his life.  A mysterious numbness afflicts his left hand when he attempts to play Beethoven))Papa's specialty))in a recital at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y.  So he abandons the concert stage to play jazz.  But this only works for a while))the recurring numbness threatens to end his career as a pianist altogether, forcing David to come to grips with the anger and fear that are crippling him.  Anger he feels toward Papa for not being there for him when he was growing up, and whose philandering, he believes, was the cause of his mother's suicide.  Fear that by following in his father's footsteps as a pianist, he is walking on forbidden ground.

Early on, David puts his finger on an essential conflict:

There was a hole where my father should have been.  And having a father who wasn't there was worse than having no father at all.  Sometimes I pretended I had no father at all.  It felt better.  I would think of him in the ground.  I would see him in his casket.  When he saw me looking at him as he lay in his casket, he would turn his head away.  I was a disappointment to him, even in death.  I was not the son he had wanted.

The novel builds to a climax when David agrees to fill in at the last minute at a summer music festival, playing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto))the work most associated in his mind with Papa.  Just before going out to play, he talks with conductor Angelo Cavaratto:

Cavaratto sat down on the sofa, motioned to me to sit beside him.  His legs were so short his feet didn't touch the floor.  "Are you going to be all right?" he asked.  

"How do you mean?"

"I see worries in your face."

"I'll be all right," I said.

"What are you troubled about?"

"I'm not troubled."

"I see in your eyes."

He waited, and finally I said, "I feel like I'm in a no-win contest with my father."

"So?  Has it not always been true that sons must battle fathers, to become men?  What is so different about you?"

I shook my head slowly back and forth, let out a noisy breath.

"What did you mean, a no-win contest?" Cavaratto asked.

"No matter how the coin flips, it's heads he wins, tails I lose.  Because I can't just go out there like any pianist and play my interpretation of the Emperor))I'm Artur Skolovsky's son.  Everybody's going to compare my playing with his, and he wears the crown to start with.  That's the heads side.  The flip side is that supposing, just supposing, I turn in a performance that people think is perhaps better than his, how's that going to make me feel?"

"It should make you feel good."

"No.  It's scary for me to even think I could do it))and at the same time I want to do it, it's what I dream of doing, it's part of why I'm here.  So yes, I'm troubled."

He put a hand on my shoulder.  "You are here because I invite you.  You play for me here, and you play the best you know how.  For me."

David gives a sterling performance, and his hand goes numb afterward, worse than ever before.  Feeling he will never be able to play the piano again, he tries to drown himself by swimming out into the sea as his mother had done.  Later he learns, with help from a therapist, how to diminish the power of the Papa in his head.  And when Papa dies of cancer two years later, he comes to grips with his need to forgive.

About the Author

Bob Hoddeson is a freelance writer, jazz pianist, and former college writing and literature teacher with a B.A. in English from Williams College and an M.A. from the University of New Hampshire. His publications include feature articles in The Boston Globe Magazine and Yankee, and seven non-fiction paperbacks published by American Publishing of Watertown, Mass. He lives with his wife in Newmarket, New Hampshire. Blues for Papa is his first novel.