Termen is in Marenko prison, outside Moscow, describing the remarkable events that followed his return to Russia, including some time in a Siberian Gulag. The second part, which is much stronger (it is where the interesting characters can be found), takes place eight years later. I thought of Katia growing older in New Jersey.” Here, two very important characters are referred to in a flat, uninteresting way: “I thought of Sasha in Leningrad, reviewing new data. Gershwin asked me about Russia”), Michaels forgets to give character or depth to the people important to Termen. Random House Canada $22.95 paper 368pp 9780345813329The writing in part one is mechanical – “They would smash in the door and thunder up the stairs” – and the descriptive rhythm soon becomes predictable, offering a tired-poetic tone: “my life whirred and dinged, accelerated and decelerated.” Furthermore, in the rush of historical settings and celebrities (“We toasted tomorrows. In New York City, he meets Clara, a violinist and, under his tutelage, a budding theremin virtuoso. This takes place against a backdrop of the Wall Street crash, Prohibition, and the Jazz Age.

In it, he recounts his student days in Russia, moving to America to introduce the theremin to a new audience, and selling his other inventions to American investors. The first of these takes place in 1938 while Termen is on The Stary Bolshevik ship back to Russia after having spent eleven years in New York City. The story, told from Termen’s first-person point of view, has two parts. But, as Michaels puts it in the author’s notes, the story “is full of distortions, elisions, omissions, and lies.” It’s a fictionalized story of Lev Termen, the Russian engineer, physicist, and inventor of the theremin – the musical instrument whose pitch and volume is controlled by the proximity of the player’s hands to two antennas. Us Conductors is the debut novel by Sean Michaels, a Montreal-based author who founded the popular music blog Said the Gramophone.

Us Conductors by Sean Michaels