Different Kinds of Music

Different Kinds of Music follows Timothy "Westy" Westmont through six episodes from his childhood and youth, through his experiences as an archivist and a thief, to encounters with William Faulkner's bear in St. Louis, Hemingway's lingering ghost at Walloon Lake in Michigan, and Phillip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus in Columbus, Ohio itself. The narrative is sometimes funny, sometimes sad; and it progresses in an order more interesting than the merely chronological. Between the episodes appears a sequence of interchapters about music, the different kinds of which define Westmont's experience from the 1940s to the turn of the 21st century in an idiom different from that of the narrative parts of the book. Different, too, is the final long chapter, "Westmont as Talbot Eastmore," in which the author of the previous five episodes tells his own story in terms of a miniature bildungsroman which is also an elegy for an old friend.