Rock of Pages: A Fine Romance
Have you ever picked up a slim volume of prose, looked at it, and uttered the words, “This should be a quick read”? That’s what I did with David Lehman‘s A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. I was sadly, sadly mistaken.
Lehman covers quite a lot of material in the course of A Fine Romance. He manages to keep the material tangentially related to the idea of Judaism and how it relates to popular song in the early part of the previous century. In the book’s opening pages, the idea of how early works such as Porgy & Bess took musical phrasing from Shabbos prayers over the Torah make for an intriguing notion.
Unfortunately, rather than explore ideas like that for the totality of the book, Lehman chooses to name-drop pretty much every songwriter to ever work out of Tin Pan Alley with a Jewish heritage. There are so many people and songs and musicals mentioned in A Fine Romance that one’s head starts to swim. If you’re less than familiar with musicals such as Oklahoma!, How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, or the works of Frank Sinatra, you’re out of your element and pretty much screwed when it comes to making it through this book.
Throw in the fact that Lehman tends to use hypotheticals such as a conversation he had in dream about Ira Gershwin, and the book tends to get rather confusing. At the start of each chapter or section, he manages to bring things back to the book’s supposed focus, but then begins rhapsodizing over each writer or performer’s merits, and A Fine Romance once again turns into an overly gushing work about popular song.
A Fine Romance manages to keep things moving a long, but by the end of Lehman’s book, there have been so many names — of songs, of musicals, of personages — tossed at the reader that one can’t help but feel overwhelmed. The effect detracts from the point that Lehman is trying to make, that being that the songwriters’ Jewish heritage influenced their songs in both words and music.
Tablet Magazine did an interview with Lehman about A Fine Romance, and you can listen to or download it here.
