By Stephen J. MillerCertain books by unknown authors make me wonder. These books are so good they make me think there might be something arbitrary and manipulating about big book publishers and bestseller lists. Unheard Music is a small book of short stories written by Peter Meinke, a retire professor living in St. Petersburg, Florida. It's published by an independent press out of Tennessee.
And yet this collection of short stories is easily just as strong and moving as Andrew Holleran's hit list In September the Light Changes. The first eight stories remind me of Adam Haslett's bestseller You are not a Stranger Here. The second half of the book is just as good as any of Michael Chabon's books of short stories.
The first part of Unheard Music consists of 8 stories about people with psychological struggles. These can be as small as jealousy and embarrassment over your spouse, or they can be as great as murderous delusions. In one story, a young boy struggles with deep family abuse that leads him to violence against animals. In another brief story, a man slowly decomposes as his wife slips off of the wagon at a class reunion. Like Haslett's Stranger, these people are distinctly human, but also haunted and haunting.
The second half of Meinke's Unheard Music is a little less cruel toward human frailty, but no less skillfully done. Here in the middle of the book is the best in the whole collection – "An Expert Witness" - a story of a black homosexual substitute teacher permanently incapacitated, made a vegetable by an accident and hospital negligence. In representing his case, a lawyer uncovers the young man's extraordinary poetry. He is motivated to check their worth with a famous poet - an irascible old curmuudgeon who even admits to the poems' beauty. The old poet becomes the case's expert witness; the young black poet seems to be life's expert witness. In fact, these gifted but unpolished works change the lives of everyone involved in the young man's case. The story is one that has come back to me over and over; I've reread it alone 8 or 9 times.
This sort of no-name book makes me want to write my very first fan letter to Mr. Meinke. I want to know more about this 75-year-old who seems destined to not be as widely read as those young authors pushed on us by the likes of Knopf and Simon & Schuster.
Unheard Music
by Peter Meinke
280 pages
ISBN 0977808661
Jefferson Press, 2007
$17.21 on Amazon
Links:
-Author's Wikipedia Entry