A favorite life story a bit off-key

In 1970, when so many people seemed to be turning against the idea of the melting pot and talking up the importance of racial and ethnic identity, a 54-year-old retired Air Force major, literature professor and down-home jazz buff from Alabama published a resounding dissent. Albert Murray’s “The Omni-Americans” outlined the lineaments of a distinctively American culture, making the case that Americans of all stripes had more in common with one another than with any of the cultures they came from.

Four years later, Murray published “Train Whistle Guitar,” the first of a four-novel autobiographical bildungsroman, chronicling the adventures of a promising young man from Alabama known as Scooter.

To kids growing up in out-of-the-way places like Scooter’s hometown of Gasoline Point, the plangent sound of the train whistle spoke of a wider world. Scooter’s boyhood adventures were followed, quite a bit later in 1991, by an evocation of his college years in “The Spyglass Tree,” and four years after that by “The Seven League Boots,” the colorful story of his experiences as a bass player in a celebrated jazz band touring the country during the Swing Era.

Disdaining what he considers the all-too-usual hard-luck saga of racial prejudice, Murray presents Scooter’s story as a modern-day fairy tale in which the beneficent spirits are teachers, relatives, friends, classmates and others met along the way, while the magic resides in the cultural treasures to be found in great literature, art and music -- especially jazz.

Jazz plays a central role in Scooter’s life, as it has for Murray, who’s written passionately and brilliantly about the blues and collaborated with Count Basie on the latter’s autobiography. From boyhood on, Scooter has idolized jazz musicians because the way they did what they did offered an example of how to go about doing whatever it turned out he was going to do. Jazz is also central to the style, voice and pacing of Scooter’s story, which is written in an expansive, sinuous prose drawing on the idioms of the language he grew up hearing and speaking.

In “The Magic Keys,” Scooter has resumed his education as a grad student in the humanities at New York University. Newly married to his fairy tale princess soul mate, Eunice Townsend, he avails himself of the cultural and intellectual delights that the city has to offer. Still, and more important, he engages in valuable conversations with numerous people, including his friends from the jazz band, an aspiring painter and a fellow Alabaman who’d been two years ahead of him in college: the elegant, self-contained, independent-minded Taft Edison (clearly modeled on Murray’s friend, that great American original, Ralph Ellison).

Now living in New York, Taft is working on a novel in which he hopes to eschew the all-too-trodden path of social protest and aim instead at the lodestar of timeless artistic greatness.

“[H]e had decided that being two book-loving down-home boys he and I had a lot to talk about, especially about the literary possibilities of the down-home idiom. Something beyond the same old overworked sociopolitical cliches about race and injustice that had long since become so usual that they were also the expected and tolerated and indulged.”

In this latest volume, we see how it all comes together for Scooter, and in this respect, it is a satisfying as well as edifying book: perceptive, wise and often funny. But as a reading experience, “The Magic Keys” lacks something. In his Proustian quest to summon up the salient features of his personal past, Murray seems to have succumbed to an off-putting stylistic long-windedness. An engaging fluidity in the previous three novels grows repetitive and flaccid here. Somehow, one feels, Murray has become so caught up in recounting the exact details of Scooter’s -- and his own -- life experience and its abiding significance that he’s not aware of this stylistic falling off, lulled as he is by the powerful enchantment of reminiscence.

Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.