Courtesy of Mitchell James Kaplan
Author Mitchell James Kaplan moved to Roanoke four years ago.
Local author Mitchell James Kaplan released his third novel, Rhapsody, on March 2.
The Simon & Schuster book follows Kay Swift, the first female American composer to score a hit musical, and her circle of Broadway pals, including her lover George Gershwin, who is perhaps best known for his composition of Porgy and Bess, in 1920s New York City. The title comes from Gershwin’s influential 1924 Jazz Age composition, Rhapsody in Blue.
The novel is already generating buzz from many critics. Publishers Weekly notes in a starred review, “Kaplan builds an enchanting world featuring musical giants George Gershwin and Kay Swift...This spellbinding and luminous tale will linger in readers’ minds long after the final page is turned.”
Additionally, Playbill, a monthly magazine devoted to all things theatre, dubbed the book one of the must read theatre books of winter 2021.
Courtesy of Mitchell James Kaplan
Kaplan's newest novel is based on the famous George Gershwin composition.
A love of music looms large over the entire narrative of the book. Kaplan is a musician who plays both the classical and jazz flute.
“I’ve always been passionate about music and found it to be an amazing thing because it isn’t a thing. It doesn’t actually exist. It’s just a succession of moments and sounds, but it’s not a thing. It only exists in the mind,” he explains.
His love of music is hereditary. In addition to being a cardiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, his father was a clarinetist. He even played with the likes of Louis Armstrong in Philadelphia when he was younger.
It was a couple of years after Kaplan’s father died that he found himself sitting at his dining table when a carousel of 300 CDs he had set to shuffle started playing Rhapsody in Blue. The clarinet opening he had listened to many times before grabbed him and didn’t let go.
“I started crying. I remembered my father playing it in the family room when I was a little boy. I saw him there and knew that it was going to be the centerpiece of my next novel,” he says.
Gershwin, Kaplan says, did something no one had ever done before with Rhapsody in Blue by taking the European high musical tradition and blended it with the Jewish music of Eastern Europe, band music and blues.
“There are all kinds of different musical influences that are boiling in this stew,” he says of the composition that Gershwin wrote in just two weeks. “It was the beginning of something Gershwin did his entire career. It united high art with a popular art tradition.”
For those who aren’t as familiar with Swift, he explains she was a “brilliant pianist who had perfect pitch.” While still an aspiring composer, she fell in love with the music Gershwin was producing, before later falling in love with him. The two collaborated musically. He helped her obtain an openness in her musical style that caused it resonate better. A graduate of the Institute of Musical Art, now the Julliard School, she helped him better understand the science of music considering that he was primarily self-taught.
Kaplan describes the journey of getting inside the minds of Gershwin and Swift to be a process of discovery. Both composers, he says, were very ambitious individuals. The drive that led them to be devoted to their art in such a single-minded way is a question that the book deeply grapples with, specifically the consequences of such ambition.
In addition to researching their personal lives, he dug into the world around them.
“It was a time of tremendous cultural disruption, social change, invention, freedom and exploration. There was Prohibition, which was basically a time of excessive drinking. There was sexual liberation. People were questioning traditional notions of marriage and monogamy. They often drew disastrous conclusions based on their questioning of these traditions and their openness to experiment,” he explains. “In New York in the 1920s, you have all of these minority cultures that were creating an American culture that would come to dominate world culture. They knew they were doing that in the context of a fading European world power.”
Although Kaplan didn’t publish his first novel until 11 years ago, he has always been a bibliophile. “I found refuge in books, particularly novels. They provided refuge from the kind of pain and confusion that adolescents experience,” he remembers.
The Yale University educator author lived in Paris for seven years after college while working as a translator and an English teacher. While back in his native California for his sister’s wedding in 1986, he found work in the film industry. In addition to working on other people’s screenplays, Kaplan and his wife sold several of their own scripts to various production companies.
It wasn’t until years later when he moved from Beverly Hills to his country house in Big Bear Lake that he decided to get back to writing novels. He returned to a novel he had worked on while living in Paris.
The book was later published in 2010 while he was living in a suburb of Pittsburg. “It was quite an exciting time,” he remembers of what his life was like after publishing his debut novel. By Fire, By Water deals with the discovery of the New World in the 15th Century and the Spanish Inquisition.
His second novel, Into the Unbounded Night, was published in 2020. Set in the 1st Century, it chronicles the Roman conquest of Britannia and Judea.
“I’m always dealing with dominant cultures and minority cultures,” he says of the through line of all his works. “I become interested in these time periods in an organic way and then the interest just emerges into a novel. In a way, the novels reflect my own voyage of discovery.”
He moved to Roanoke four years ago from Pennsylvania after stopping in the Star City on a trip with his wife to Atlanta. Downtown immediately charmed them to the point in which they started looking at houses on their first day in the city. They happened upon an old Victorian house that was listed for a price the Kaplans couldn’t refuse.
“I love the compactness of the city. I can get anywhere very easily. We can walk downtown in about 20 minutes. We can walk to Grandin in about 20 minutes. We’re right between the two,” he says. “This area has a lot of artistic types.”
When he’s not working on his novels, Kaplan is traveling to industrial facilities around the world to help prevent and curtail environmental accidents, unethical work practices, dangerous activities and other problems that might affect local and global populations.
The book can be found at Simon and Schuster's website here.
About the Author:
Aila Boyd is an educator and journalist who resides in Roanoke. She holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University.