Chamber Music owes its title and epigraph to James Joyce's first published collection of poems. The choice is apt. There's a certain lilting lyricism here and a prissy finde-siècle sense to the double entendre—the diseased male protagonist relieves himself in a chamber pot. More importantly, he is a composer and pianist, and music is present throughout. Most importantly perhaps, and as Carolyn Maclaren, the 90-year-old narrator, declares at novel's end: "Asked to write the history of a man and institution, I have managed to produce merely a sketch of the chamber of one heart. Like Robert, I see, I am a miniaturist."

This miniature, however, feels chockfull….

Chamber Music is convincing indeed. The doughty dame who pens these lines, rejecting the offer of secretarial help, elects to write of "what seems real: disappointments, despairs, rare intense joys and even rarer loves. And finally, for us all, the omnipresent aloneness of our lives."…

Much of the shock value of the sexual revelations … seems coy. "Nowadays a relationship such as Anna and I had may be openly declared. Women who love as we loved are called freely by the name of the isle inhabited by the Greek poetess." And the clarion call rings hollow, or in a minor key. The dying Anna asks:

… 'Carrie. Where is God?'

'God. What do you mean? The priest, do you mean the priest? Do you want me to call the priest?'

'Cold,' she said. 'God. Carrie.'

And she died.

The problem with this voice is that it's at a third remove—remembered long after the fact by a nonagenarian not the author. So it's difficult to know with what degree of seriousness we're meant to receive such a message, and where to locate belief: is the juxtaposition of "god" and "Carrie" intentional, and on whose part? Similarly, are we meant to construe Caroline's ignorance of her husband's condition as foolish, innocent or syphiliphobic? She's telling us this tale, after all, a good 60 years after she found out the facts.

Yet such lapses are few and the accomplishments many. The novel never falters in its feel for period or place, and Ms. Grumbach writes with real tact. In scene after scene—an amateur soprano straining for an aria, an old man fashioning birdhouses for those birds that fail to migrate, a young woman planting horsehair to keep fruit trees from pests—she manages to make us hear the difficult music of grace. (p. 45)