Waterfront Whorehouse Pianist

I’ll admit, I usually semi-judge a book by its cover. After glancing at the cover of Waterfront Whorehouse Pianist, I wasn’t sure how to organize my initial feelings. Being a picture focusing on a grand piano in an old-time looking building completely covered in a shade of blue, made me feel like the story might be an old one and/or a sad one. After reading the story, I can say that I was mostly correct. The main character, Ben, becomes the piano player at a waterfront whorehouse after his job as a lawyer gets suspended. The story focuses on Ben’s experiences throughout his life, both past and present, that are both good and bad. Due to a life-changing and traumatizing experience in his past, his present way of living is impacted by this event and has been hindering his ability to truly be happy. Ben is a likable and easy-going guy who has been dealt some bad cards in his life. After politics in his law firm, he is released from his job and must now find a new means to survive. With his change in career comes a change in mentality about life in general. Working at a whorehouse as the pianist supplies him with a steady stream of customers to observe and characters to interact with that will help him to move on with his life and figure out the reason so much misfortune among so many.

Waterfront Whorehouse Pianist is very well written. The content included in these pages is safe to be rated at a PG-13, with sex and drugs being the main feature in many of Ben’s relationships and memories. Sobel wrote the whole book to really make you think about your own relationships, and how we might inadvertently immortalize one particular relationship in our own lives that could be reevaluated to discover unseen flaws. It is safe to say that no body or thing should be put on a high pedestal, especially since it can’t be perfect to begin with. Ben’s life is so different from mine, and probably many others, that it was hard for me to relate to many aspects of it, but exploring broken relationships and self-discovery are universal concepts that should be able to be understood by many. I could see this book being made into a sequel (or maybe that’s just my hopes), as I would love to see what happens to Ben, Ralph, Gina, Ted, etc. since they all played large and important roles in the story.