Sisters in Jazz

Kim Echlin, in Under the Visible Life, her first novel since the success of The Disappeared, which was nominated for the 2009 Giller Prize, tantalizes the reader with a brief epigraph from jazz genius John Coltrane: “I start in the middle of a sentence and move in both directions at once.”

If that had been on a playbill for a Coltrane concert, I would have been there in a minute, because he really knew how to do that, not because he was telling a particular story (which he could also do brilliantly) but because he could reach so deeply inside himself that he made you feel as if you were one with him, one with the music, no matter where it lead. Echlin, on the other hand has assumed a different kind of role: she is going to tell you only what you need to know, and it is up to you, the reader, to decide if you want to come along on this trip. Her story structure is more...