54 pages • 1 hour read
Brendan SlocumbThe Violin Conspiracy
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5: “Starstruck”
Chapter 20 Summary: “Nicole; 6 Months Ago”
Janice reaches out and tells Ray that he’ll be playing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, one of the most renowned orchestras in the world. Prior to that performance, he lines up a show at Carnegie Hall and prepares for another one with the Erie Philharmonic. As he rehearses, a beautiful viola player catches his attention. She comes up to him after their rehearsal and introduces herself as Nicole. Ray is nervous and flustered. After he returns to his hotel, he thinks about her and about his prior lack of success with women. When he performs the next day, he’s nervous and tries not to stare at Nicole. He loses his place in the music, but his discipline and training carry him to the end. Afterward, Nicole has left, and he vows to put her behind him. He travels to New York for his Carnegie Hall performance. He rehearses with a piano accompanist, Grace, who is cold and distant toward him. When he performs, he plays “Spanish Dance,” which he often played for his grandmother, and wins the audience over. After the show, Nicole meets him outside and says that she came to see his performance. She compliments his musical technique. She explains that she’s there for the evening before catching an inexpensive train back. They go to dinner together and talk about their respective experiences learning music. She tells him that she hopes to move up to a bigger orchestra. As their evening comes to a close, Ray invites her to stay the night. She leaves the next morning, and Ray receives a call from 60 Minutes requesting a feature interview.
Chapter 21 Summary: “60 Minutes; 5 Months Ago”
Ray prepares to perform with the Chicago Symphony on 60 Minutes. Nicole and Janice have both flown in to watch and support him. Backstage, Ray calls Janice in the audience to help calm his nerves. She and Nicole talk to Ray on the phone and encourage him before he goes onstage. After the performance, he and Nicole watch the segment on TV together at Nicole’s house. The host, Anderson Cooper, introduces Ray and his background. He also talks about the racial disparity in classical music. The segment explores the history of the Stradivarius violin and introduces the lawsuits that Ray is facing. Cooper interviews both Ray’s family and the Markses. When Andrea Marks maintains that the violin belongs to them, Cooper questions the ethics of suing a descendant of the people whom their family enslaved. The interview unnerves Ray, and he hides in the bathroom flipping through a Men’s Health magazine that’s sitting nearby. Later, Kim gets in touch to talk about the Marks case. Ray still doesn’t have any family records about Leon.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Boston; 4 Months Ago”
Ray receives an influx of invitations from orchestras across the country. He considers his relationship to the violin and how it feels like something personal and alive. He goes to a recital in Boston, reflecting on his performance of a Dvorák piece that reminds him of his grandmother. On his way out, he stops at a diner and encounters Dante and Andrea Marks. Ray tries to dissuade them, but they argue and Ray becomes angry and aggressive. He realizes that two police officers have come up behind him and heard him yelling. They ask him for an ID, and Andrea pretends to be flustered and afraid. The police force him to prove his ownership, so he plays a scale. They are convinced and begin searching for him online, discovering who he is. They dismiss the Markses, who storm off angrily.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Settlement; 4 Months Ago”
Ray goes to visit his Aunt Rochelle. She calls in sick so that she can spend the day with him, and they have lunch together. They discuss the family’s lawsuit, with which Aunt Rochelle disagrees, and Ray asks her to help him track down documentation about Leon. As they wander and explore the city, Aunt Rochelle encourages Ray to go talk to a pretty girl. He tells her about Nicole. A few days later, Aunt Rochelle writes to say that she hasn’t been able to find any useful papers. However, Ray isn’t convinced that his family looked very hard. He comes up with a plan to make peace with his family and find any missing paperwork. Kim, however, disagrees. Ray sits down with his family and their lawyers and announces that he has a proposal: He will pay each family member $10,000 a year for 10 years and add them as beneficiaries to the violin’s insurance. He tells them that he wants them to find any papers belonging to Leon Marks, and in exchange he will offer them another $500,000 collectively. His family agrees, and they search for the missing papers with renewed energy. However, they’re unable to find anything, and Ray thinks that they were probably thrown away.
Chapter 24 Summary: “Theft”
Preparation heats up for the looming Tchaikovsky Competition. Ray imposes a rigorous schedule of practice and private lessons. Nicole comes to see him once a week. She is continuously supportive, even as Ray structures every minute of his day. A month before the competition, they meet in New York to celebrate the cumulation of his lessons. They go to dinner with one of Ray’s teachers and his partner and discuss the magic of the Stradivarius. The next morning when Ray and Nicole go their separate ways, the violin is stolen from their hotel room. When Ray discovers the theft at home, he goes into shock and feels disconnected from reality. Without his violin, he feels crushingly alone and as though he’s been stripped of his worth. The FBI and the insurance investigator, Alicia, investigate futilely. Nicole believes that Ray’s family is responsible, while Ray blames the Markses.
Chapter 25 Summary: “Day 17: Raising Money and Hope”
The loss of the violin inspires Ray to work even harder and to push himself to raise money for the ransom. His crowdfunding site raises more than $100,000 in just a few days. Nicole helps him to set up the site and attract more donors. She’s angry with the insurance company for not paying the ransom themselves and has argued with them against their policies. Initially, there were several possible sources of the theft, but none of them have led to the violin’s recovery. Pilar Jimenez, Ray’s family, and the Marks family have all been investigated. Ray begins reaching out to more classical music fans and going on talk shows to solicit donations for his cause. Janice takes out a second mortgage in order to donate $245,000. After a few weeks, Ray has raised more than $2 million. He knows that the worldwide viewers of the Tchaikovsky Competition are his best chance at getting the money that he needs, and so succeeding in the competition becomes more important than ever.
Chapter 26 Summary: “Day 32: Departure”
As Ray prepares to leave for Moscow, where the competition is held, Kim calls to tell him that the Markses have adjusted their lawsuit and are now trying to claim the violin’s insurance money. Their lawyer wants an assessment of the violin’s original case, which Ray has stored in a garbage bag under his bed. He and Kim agree to take the case to Jacob Fisher to examine. Ray collects the case to drop off before he leaves for Moscow.
Part 5 Analysis
Part 5 opens with another major turning point in Ray’s life. The chapter heading itself, “Nicole,” is the first mention of this character since the novel left the present day behind and a sign that she will quickly become integral to the plot. Because she is such a central part of Part 1, her introduction here resolves the backshadowing of her character at the beginning. Ray falls in love with her immediately, despite knowing almost nothing about her. Ray’s eagerness, lack of experience, and willingness to believe in a healthy partnership make him an ideal target for Nicole’s betrayal. These are characteristics that allow Slocomb to provide clues to the reader as to the resolution of the overarching conflict: Nicole’s theft. One more significant clue is provided: Ray finds two women’s magazines and a Men’s Health magazine in Nicole’s bathroom, despite her purportedly living alone. Later in the novel, re-examining this magazine sets Ray on the final stretch to retrieving his stolen violin. Through this material clue, Slocumb uses the conventions of the detective genre in which both reader and protagonist are presented with information with which to solve the crime.
This section also contains the distinctive 60 Minutes feature on Ray, which loosely overviews his life, the varied challenges he’s currently facing, and the state of the American classical music industry. This chapter serves as a check-in point for the novel, in which the central threads of antagonism are brought together and assessed. The fact that 60 Minutes is a real show heightens the verisimilitude of Chapter 21 that draws the reader’s attention to real issues being faced in the world today. In addition to the disparity among classical musicians, the segment touches upon the issue of slavery reparations. While interviewing the Marks siblings, the show host questions whether the idea of theft might be irrelevant; he suggests that “even if Ray’s ancestor did take the violin, he and his family are actually owed much more by your family—that it’s from his family’s labor that your family was able to prosper” (220). These questions are being discussed and addressed in the wider world on shows such as 60 Minutes.
In addition to dealing with the Markses and the systemic racism that confronts him every day, Ray also comes up with a creative way to address his own family. Immediately after the deal is made, the novel returns to the present moment with Chapter 24: “Theft”—the first chapter without a time stamp. The novel’s return to the theft reflects the musical structure of rondo form in which a principal theme returns between contrasting episodes—this form was developed by composers such as Mozart and Tchaikovsky whose music Ray plays in the novel. Because the theft has already been visited once before, it goes by quickly and recounts the events through an objective, reporting voice. From this point forward, the Tchaikovsky Competition comes to mean something new as Ray takes it upon himself to buy back his family heirloom. The section closes with Ray leaving to go to Russia and compete, thereby setting up the final act of the story.
