The Music of Making

With the book House, I've been noticing this second time around that Tracy Kidder focuses on individuals with an eye toward bringing them together later in scenes that are often contentious. The effect is almost like a concerto, a musical composition in which individual instruments have solos, then they are all brought together to play in concert. Here is one definition of concerto from The Free Dictionary:

Musical composition for solo instrument and orchestra. . . . Nineteenth-century concertos were often conceived as a kind of dramatic struggle between soloist and orchestra; many later composers preferred that the soloist blend with the orchestra.

Wikipedia makes this contribution:

The etymology is uncertain, but the word seems to have origin from the conjunction of the two Latin words concert (meaning to tie, to join, to weave) and certamen (competition, fight): the idea is that the two parts in a concert, the soloist and the orchestra, alternate episodes of opposition and cooperation in the creation of the music flow. (Concerto)

That last bit--the idea of alternating "opposition and cooperation in the creation of the music flow"--is very similar to what Kidder is doing in House.  Each person involved in the house building has a section where we learn about him or her--what he or she thinks, what each person looks like, acts like, his or her speech, history, vices and virtues, almost as if the author is doing a character study. Then those individuals come together for a few pages. Like a concerto, there is the solo performance, then the ensemble, back and forth, over and over.

Once we start to get to know the people in Kidder's book (or as the writer has allowed us to know them), we try to anticipate how they will behave in group settings, how each will react to the moves of the others.  Such anticipation increases the tension in the story; we wait to see how things will turn out.  Will Jonathan, the owner and successful lawyer, manage to get a concession in price from the "rigid" builder? Will the carpenters feel like they're getting suitable compensation for their hard work?  Will the architect solidify the plans in time to begin framing?

Like a concerto, though, there is not always opposition; sometimes there is cooperation.  The exciting part is that you (the reader) never know which it's going to be. That's how Tracy Kidder keeps us reading, how he makes a seemingly mundane subject like building a house into a "dramatic struggle."