THE VEXATIONS

By Caitlin Horrocks

A curious form of mystery builds in “The Vexations,” the debut novel by Caitlin Horrocks. This suspense has little to do with the narrative’s central character, an aspiring French composer named Eric, who eventually becomes Erik Satie: the famous author of the melancholic, graceful “Gymnopédies,” as well as the proto-conceptual-art composition that gives the book its title.

Whether one knows these works intimately or not, a reader can’t help being aware that Satie is not going to be confined to the margins of Montmartre’s bohemia forever. (And you probably do know the first of those “Gymnopédies,” a beautiful, pensive piece that turns up in movies as different as the mellow, existentialist comedy “My Dinner With Andre” and the explicitly erotic “Love.”) Deprived of the element of surprise, Horrocks instead wrings drama from her method of narration.

In alternating chapters, “The Vexations” shifts among several vantage points, including that of Satie; his brother, Conrad; the painter and artist’s model Suzanne Valadon, with whom Satie is infatuated; as well as a poet and sometime collaborator of Satie’s named Philippe — a figure invented by Horrocks but loosely based on his friend the Spanish poet Patrice Contamine de Latour.

These characters offer insights into Satie’s childhood and his years of quasi penury and anonymity in fin de siècle Paris. But as literary vehicles they cannot match the voice of Satie’s often-estranged sister, Louise, the longest-lived member of his family, which scattered shortly after the death of the siblings’ mother when they were still very young.