Bel Canto

Bel Canto is Ann Patchett's 2001 fourth novel, the Orange Prize winner and the PEN/Faulkner Award winner that established Patchett's broader American literary commercial readership before The Dutch House and Tom Lake. The structural premise is loosely based on the 1996-1997 Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Lima, Peru. South American guerrillas storm a vice-presidential mansion in an unnamed South American capital during the birthday celebration of Mr. Hosokawa, a Japanese industrialist whose company has been considering investment in the region; the guerrillas' actual target (the country's president) is not at the party. Hostages and captors are stuck in the mansion together for four-plus months. The hostages include the American operatic soprano Roxane Coss, who was hired to perform the night's recital, and her admirers from across the international corporate-and-political class who flew in to attend.

Patchett's structural method is the patient close-third-person construction across approximately ten central figures (Roxane Coss, Mr. Hosokawa, his translator Gen Watanabe, the Vice President Ruben Iglesias, the various corporate guests, the guerrilla commanders Benjamin and Alfredo and Hector, and the young guerrillas they have brought with them) across the months-long confinement. The operatic recital material is rendered with the kind of patient classical-music specificity contemporary American literary commercial fiction rarely commits to. The Gen-and-Carmen subplot in the back half (the translator and a young female guerrilla) is the structural emotional engine and the part that carries the novel's structural argument about how prolonged confinement and shared aesthetic experience can produce a recognition that the operational mechanics of contemporary geopolitics specifically suppress. The novel's structural payoff is one of the most-discussed contemporary American literary endings of the past twenty-five years.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Patchett entry point alongside The Dutch House and Tom Lake, and as the canonical contemporary American hostage-and-opera literary novel. The Anna Fields audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.