Chopin’s second piano scherzo was described by Schumann as ‘overflowing with tenderness, boldness, love and contempt’. Jennifer Neal’s dazzling debut novel Notes on Her Colour may be its equivalent in literary form. As an aspiring concert pianist, the protagonist, Gabrielle, strives to master the Chopin piece as a measure of her accomplishment. In her senior year of high school, she’s living at home in Florida in a house decorated solely in white. Music becomes her escape route from a prison of dysfunction as turbulent, hurricane-prone, ‘wet and sticky‘ as Florida itself.
Colour reverberates as the driving metaphor in a coming-of-age story about race, first love, madness and liberation. Gabrielle and her mother, Tallulah, share the ability to change the colour of their skin, not only from black to white but to every spectrum in nature. Symbolic of the transient and nebulous hold they have over their emotions, their skin colour mirrors every surge of commotion in their minds. Except at home, where in a ‘monophonic melody of violence’ Gabrielle’s father, an abusive alcoholic, demands they be white in his presence, a colonisation of their bodies as tyrannical as the dominant ideologies that enclose them.
Magical realism, a literary form with a history of revolutionary intent, gives this story an element of the surreal. Complicit between writer and reader is that we enter the writer’s imaginative realm unencumbered by any compulsion except to witness. Gabrielle is an unforgettable character who, through the power of music and her own agency, disentangles herself from corrosive bonds of abuse, discrimination and emotional blackmail to find a place where she is ‘fiercely, undeniably loved’.
Reviewed by Anne Green
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