Partita is Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel since the runaway triumph of 2022’s Demon Copperhead, which won multiple prizes and sold millions of copies. Both a witty reimagining of David Copperfield and a sharp riposte to JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, it sought to offer a more complex and sympathetic account of the rural inhabitants of Appalachia than they habitually receive. Partita is similarly set in that region, but is a far quieter book: its story is simple, but its resonances complex.
It is narrated by Livia, a woman in her late forties living in the small east Tennessee county she grew up in: she is childless, comfortably married to a farmer, and, although once an outstandingly promising musician, she now teaches piano to the locals.
We know from the outset that Livia lost a brother to suicide when she was a child, leaving her to cope alone with an abusive mother and a quiet, cowed father. Other forms of damage, it is steadily intimated, have followed – but her current existence is safe and settled. Or maybe “settled for”? That is the question nagging at Livia, reopened by a phone call from an old flame, giving her a week to decide whether to see him again, at the risk of exposing long-kept secrets and long-nurtured wounds.
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