Review: Imperfect Solo

Published Apr 16, 2014

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by Steven Boykey Sidley

There’s something alluring and sexy about a great saxophone solo; on that rare occasion when it’s a great performance, it’s as sweet a moment as it gets. For a brief space, time hangs like a golden shower.

This single moment of perfection is the grail for Meyer, an alter ego of Steven Boykey Sidley, himself a saxophonist (in a band with Rian Malan) who has turned out three marvellous books in quick succession.

And what about that middle name, I ask him during his recent Cape Town visit (he lives in Johannesburg).

“When I was born to an American mother, the midwife said, ‘what a nice boykie!’ and she loved it, so I’ve been called that ever since – do call me Boykey,” though, he adds, “some people find that difficult.”

And he has a point, because playful as it is, it also has dissonance with his author persona: witty and bright with the passion and uncertainties of middle age.

(Also, his middle name is actually Harry, so Boykey is better PR schtick.)

Sidley is calmer and more engaging than I had imagined. It’s unsurprising, given his writings, to encounter him reading a Philip Roth biography, Roth Unbound – A Writer and his Books by Claudia Pierpont – and we plunge immediately into admiring Roth’s extraordinary body of work.

Sidley is fond of stating that “a book is a scaffold to excavate themes”, not dissimilar to Roth.

They have both plunged into the hurly-burly of risked lives, passionate, controversial and game-changing, but with the capacity for great kak.

They’re both firm secularists: “My father was passionate about the primacy of science,” says Sidley, who went from Wits University to UCLA for his MSc, and for two decades in the US lived the wild child/creative/party life.

Thing is: we all think the primacy of discovery is about the world until it dawns on us that the real journey is one of self-discovery, with all the mistakes and flaws and joys and tragedies of life.

Imperfect Solo is such a journey, filled with mordant humour and misery, and characters I’d want to encounter at my ideal dinner party – preferably a little worse for wear, that marvellous interregnum when inhibitions are sufficiently dropped but guests aren’t too pasted to descend into drivel or incoherence.

Meyer, the central character of Imperfect Solo, is in a mid-life crisis of biblical proportions. He’s forty-ish, eluding the fame his early promise portended, and his life is going south at speed. He is filled with dread – as it turns out, with fair reason, as disasters stack up and gnash at his heels.

I thought of the Old Testament’s Job when reading Solo, but the book is too ironic for that simile to hold (Sidley confirms he did not consciously think of Job while writing). Meyer’s sh*tstorm of a life steamrollers into dread actualised, but there is also some redemption.

He has simply learnt to ask for little – certainly less than he might have earlier – and to be glad of the grace of the rare but perfect moment.

He also has supporters, the most engaging of whom is certainly Farzad, his Iranian, Harvard-trained psychologist friend who placidly offers dry, wise advice and who has learnt to live contentedly with the paradoxes of his own traditional/modern existence.

Farzad is the “moral centre” of Meyer’s thrashing life, a person we’d all hope to have as a sturdy lifeline.

“I think men get more hopeless as we get older,” Sidley – or Boykey – confides. “We have a set of standards of what it is to be male, and can’t live up to that, and end up flailing and battered.”

All Sidley’s books are a discourse on the inexorable march of life.

“I’d like to think my two children (with Kate Sidley, also a writer) will grow up free of superstition,” he confides. “And take risks. But not too many (though I did). Not too dangerous.”

It’s a hope many of us hold, and yet one over which we have no control, like Meyer. What to do? Keep going.

Imperfect Solo is the best of Boykey’s impressive books so far, and, I trust, by no means the last.

It’s also the one I most want to reread.

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