Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa was our April book club pick and it made for an interesting discussion even if not everyone liked it.
Pick a Colour is the story of Ning, an ex-boxer who now owns a nail salon. She is single, in her early forties, lives above the salon and keeps things to herself. She is observant, though: “You look at something long enough and you begin to see everything in its details.”
Everyone who works for her is called Susan because “So many girls come and go. I don’t want to bother getting new name tags each time.” Everyone in Ning’s salon is replaceable and interchangeable. “We all have black shoulder-length hair and wear black T-shirts and black pants. We are, more or less, the same height, too.”
Thammavongsa’s follows a day in the life of a salon. Mia, Ning’s employee and possibly her only friend, spend time talking about the clients as they go about their tasks: manicures and pedicures, facials and threading. Ning is slow to reveal anything personal about herself. “I don’t like to talk to people,” she says “The other girls are better at it than I am, and I don’t mind nodding along. If I had a signature move, the nod is mine.”
But over the course of the day, Ning does drop little hints about her time as a boxer and her regrets. For example, when one of her clients laments her fifth miscarriage, Ning thinks
…suddenly I felt a sadness. That we get one life and sometimes in that life we’re just not going to get to do everything. And in this life, I understood, that was something I wasn’t going to get to do. It’s a grief, but for something you never even had or even loved.
Pick a Colour is a quiet novel that is more character study than plot, but Ning is an interesting character to spend time with. It won the 2025 Giller Prize.
Sonya Hartnett’s novel What the Birds See begins with a nod to a real-life mystery. In 1966, siblings Jane, Arnna and Grant Beaumont went to the beach and disappeared without a trace. In Hartnett’s novel, the Metford siblings are heading to the shop for some ice cream. “The route they’d take to the shop would bend around four corners: two right turns, two left.” They never make it to their destination.
In the background of this disappearance, nine-year-old Adrian lives with his grandmother, Beattie, and his uncle Rory. His is a lonely existence. He has ended up here because his mother Sookie can no longer care for him and his father wanted to be free. Beattie is annoyed by her grandson and loves him, although she doesn’t know how to demonstrate that love. Rory, 25, barely comes out of his bedroom. Two years ago, Rory had been in a car accident that had caused much harm and he “had given up much of his vitality […]He has no desire, now, to truly live–none to participate, none to appreciate.”
Adrian is anxious. He “worries about all sorts of things.” The disappearance of the Metfords just gets added to his list of worries: quicksand, his closest door ajar, spontaneous combustion, tidal waves, sea monsters, being locked inside a shopping center, that his grandmother will forget to collect him from school at the end of the day.
Hartnett’s book is about lost children. The Metfords literally disappear; Adrian is lost in a world of adults who pay little attention to him. When siblings move into the house across the road, they are lost children too. Coincidentally, these newcomers are two girls and one boy, similar ages to the Metfords. Their sudden appearance serves as a reminder of the missing children.
All Adrian wants is “a calm and rosy world; he is prepared to accept anything, if anything is what keeps the peace.” The road to adulthood is tricky, littered with landmines and in this version of childhood almost impossible to navigate successfully.
I knew from the opening line that I was going to love Rebecca Wait’s novel Our Fathers.
If she had survived, Katrina would have said what people always say: that it had been a day like any other.
Set on the remote Scottish island, Litta, Our Fathers tells the story of Tommy, who has returned home after 20 years to confront the trauma of his past. He arrives on his uncle’s doorstep and the two men settle into an uneasy routine. What happened on the island all those years ago belongs to Malcolm, too.
One day, seemingly out of the blue, Tom’s father, John –this is not a spoiler as it’s mentioned in the blurb–shot his mother, older brother, Nicky, baby sister, Beth and then himself. Tommy hid and was spared. John was Malcolm’s brother. Tommy was eight. Obviously, this horrific crime sent a shock wave through the small close-knit community and Tommy arriving back as an adult stirs things up again.
Both Tom and Malcolm have a difficult time talking. That was always Malcolm’s wife Heather’s domain, but she died six years ago. Now in his early sixties, Malcolm has grown used to his solitary life on the island. With Tom’s unexpected arrival, Malcolm is “so shocked that for a few moments he couldn’t even speak.”
Why has Tommy returned now?
By all accounts, John was a loving husband and a good father, but there is no way around what he did that fateful day. For all these years after, Malcolm has tried to grapple with his brother’s crime but
he knew as well as anyone what a strange darkness the past was, how we plucked pieces from it and refitted them to our own purposes. The past was a story we told ourselves.
We spend a lot of time with uncle and nephew as they tiptoe around their shared history, but it is not the only perspective we get. There is also a section where we meet Katrina, Tommy’s mother, before she ever meets John. It’s interesting to get this view of her, to see how her own upbringing (raised by a narcissistic mother) shaped her. Part of Tommy’s return to Litta, I think, has to do with learning a little about her. We also learn about how she met John and their relationship; we can see what people on Litta never did.
There is also a cast of interesting characters on Litta most especially Fiona, who reluctantly hosts a dinner party for Tommy. It is here that some of the cracks start to appear and, later, when we see that Fiona and Katrina had once been friends. Fiona has her own part to play in Tommy’s story. She muses
What do any of us do in the end except what we believe is right at the time, without having all of the information, without knowing how things will turn out? We leap into the darkness with our only protection our idea of what is right, and who can ask more of us than that? We do our best, Fiona thought. I have always done my best.
I loved this book. It is beautifully written – the landscape is wild and rugged. Tommy and Malcolm are taciturn and unable to say what they desperately need to say. Both men are incredibly sympathetic. There is an element of suspense, although that’s not necessarily what drives the plot. It’s a masterful look at memory, guilt, love and family.
I have been a letter writer my whole life. Perhaps part of it had to do with how much we moved around (and, no, my father was not in the military), but I always wrote letters. For a while in my early teens I had a whole load of pen pals, people you’d meet via ads in teen magazines or through school. One of my oldest pen pals I have known for 52 years. We don’t write letters anymore, which I miss. (Now it’s just the odd message via the internet, which is a poor substitute.) I do not have every letter I have ever received –sadly too many moves– but I do have a handful of special letters. Recently I met an old boyfriend at his father’s funeral and he told me he had saved some of my letters to him…from almost 40 years ago and when I asked if I could have them, he obliged and sent them my way. Talk about an embarrassing blast from the past
So, you see, I was predisposed to love Virginia Evans’s debut The Correspondent and I did.
Sybil Van Antwerp “is a mother and grandmother, divorced from a distinguished career in law” but it is “the correspondence that is her manner of living.”
This is the only exposition we get in the novel, the rest is Sybil’s correspondence with a variety of people including authors (Joan Didion and Ann Patchett); her adult children (Fiona and Bruce); her best friend, Rosalie; her beloved brother, Felix, and Harry, the young son of a former colleague. There is also one letter, never sent, to someone called Colt.
Some of the letters in the novel are from Sybil to the recipient and some letters are to Sybil, but we are able to piece together a variety of different “plots” based on these letters. For example, we know that Sybil has a fraught relationship with her daughter and a close relationship with Felix. Both Sybil and Felix were adopted. At least one of her correspondents seems to hold a grudge:
I imagine you reading my notes standing at the mailbox, heat growing on your neck and the sick feeling in your stomach. […] I hope you have to look twice, and that little fear keeps you from enjoying the life you have left, in the same way that you impeded me.
It is through Sybil’s correspondence that we learn about a tragedy in her past, her disintegrating marriage (30 years prior, because Sybil is now in her 70s), her stubbornness, her kindness, and her desire to make things right when she can. She is a fully realized character without ever saying a word. As Sybil says in one letter: “my letters have been far more meaningful to me than anything I did with the law. The letters are the mainstay of my life”.
er correspondence (both sent and received) is funny, nostalgic, heartbreaking, and mundane, and it accurately captures the minutia of daily life. Just when Sybil thinks there can be no surprises left for her, she discovers that’s not quite true.
I loved every single thing about this book. An easy five stars, no notes, highly recommended.
Maya and Roe, the central characters of Maxine Swann’s 2003 novel Serious Girls meet at boarding school their junior year. Maya’s grandmother had insisted she attend the school, partly to get her away from her hippie mother, insisting that Maya would be “stunted[…]living out there in the boondocks.”
Maya feels like an outsider until she meets Roe, who comes from a nothing town in Georgia. The two girls find that they have a lot in common, a love for thrifting and literature and a desire to figure out who they are and who they might become. Roe asks “if the whole aim in life is to become as distinctly yourself as you can?”
The two girls begin a year long-long journey to figure themselves and their world out and it’s a strange journey, indeed. What Roe wants is “to feel alive, the whole way through.”
As you might expect, part of this journey has to do with boys. For Maya, who is our first person narrator, it’s Arthur, a young man she sees at a diner on a trip into New York City. For Roe, it’s Jesse, who lives in the town where they go to school. There is also drinking and smoking, which feels like a costume the girls put on in order to feel older. (It’s hard to say when this story takes place. The 60s? 70s?) There are no adults to guide them; Maya’s grandmother who invites the girls to spend Christmas with her, feeds them martinis and doesn’t seem to mind when they flirt with much older men.
I kept turning the pages as Maya and Roe try to determine “What makes a person a person?” the prose was spare and the plot non-existent, but somehow I found it sort of intriguing, even though I wasn’t really sure there was a point. Well, maybe that’s the point. Your adolescence is just a series of missteps and ultimately, for better or worse, you step over the line from innocence to experience.
French writer Victor Jestin’s debut novella, Heatwave, was published to much acclaim when he was just twenty six. Translated by Sam Taylor, this is the story of an introverted and angsty 17-year-old called Leo who is on the last day of a camping holiday with his parents and younger siblings. The opening of the novel is definitely punchy.
Oscar is dead because I watched him die and did nothing. He was strangled by the ropes of a swing, like one of those children you read about in the newspapers. But Oscar was not a child. At seventeen, you don’t die like that by accident. You tie the rope around your neck because you want to feel something. Maybe he was trying to find a new form of pleasure. After all, that was what we were here for: the pleasure. Anyway, I did nothing. Everything stemmed from that.
Heatwave captures the last 36 hours or so of Leo’s holiday at “the Landes, in the southwest corner of France. Three stars. Surrounded by pine forest. Close to the ocean. Swimming pool with slide. Children’s playground. Karaoke, gym, special events every night.” For the other teenagers on site, it’s endless partying and hookups, but Leo is quiet and awkward. The only friend Leo has made in his two weeks at the campsite is Louis, who “didn’t have any other friends, so he put up with [Leo].”
After the novel’s inciting incident, and the decision Leo makes afterwards, the novel just follows Leo around “annoyed with everyone on the beach–for failing to hear [his] silent screams, for failing to guess.” He considers telling various people about what he knows, his parents, Oscar’s mother, Luce, the girl he wants to hook up with, but he is never quite able to say the words.
I think Jestin’s novel is trying to capture the claustrophobic, confusing business of being a teenager on the cusp pf adulthood. Pettiness, a failure to communicate, poor decision making, and a longing to shed our own skins, to be someone cooler and more in control, are feelings everyone can relate to (or remember). I think this book would likely be more meaningful to a younger reader, but it was easy to turn the pages and even though I didn’t really understand Leo’s brain and felt sort of disconnected from the story, it was an interesting and disconcerting read.
Although Things Don’t Break on Their Own is touted as a “miraculous literary thriller”, I think that’s doing Sarah Easter Collins’ debut a disservice. While the book is definitely literary and it’s definitely a page turner, I don’t think I would call it a “thriller”. But maybe that’s nitpicking and it really doesn’t matter.
Robyn and her wife, Cat, have invited some friends and family round for dinner. There’s Robyn’s older brother, Michael, and his girlfriend, Liv. There’s Nate, Cat’s brother, and his new girlfriend, Claudette, and then there’s Willa and her boyfriend, Jamie. Robyn and Willa have history; when they were 17 and in boarding school together they were roommates and then lovers, but it ended badly. That was years ago, now, though and the two women are friends. It wasn’t a particularly happy time for Willa. Her younger sister, Laika, disappeared when she was just 13 and nearly 22 years later, the family still doesn’t know what happened to her.
The story changes perspectives and doesn’t follow a straight line. As Robyn anticipates Willa’s arrival, she remembers the summer she took her back to Tea Mountain, the remote place she calls home. It is a transformative experience for Willa, whose own family is a dysfunctional mess. Robyn’s father is a potter, and as he repairs a broken bowl using the Japanese method of kintsugi, he assures Willa (without even knowing her all that well) that “You can fix anything, given the right tools.”
There is no fixing Willa’s fractured family though. Her father, Bryce, has a successful business, so money is not an issue, but he is a horrible and abusive bully, especially to Willa’s mother and Laika. In fact, Bryce never touched Willa, and perhaps some of her guilt stems from that. About Laika, Robyn says
I tried to keep her safe. I really did. I told her, keep your head down, don’t bring unnecessary attention to yourself, just do what you’re told, all the things that just came naturally to me. But I was so busy keeping her safe from herself that I forgot to warn her about the outside world. I should have told her that there were people out there, men, women even, who could harm her.
So much was my fault.
Robyn and Cat’s dinner party proves to be revelatory, but by the time you get to the “twist” (maybe that’s why they call this book a thriller), you’ll be so invested in these characters that –well, I don’t want to say it hardly matters, but it was honestly the least interesting part of the book.
I really enjoyed Things Don’t Break on Their Own. The writing was great, the characters were compelling, and the mystery surrounding Laika’s disappearance was intriguing. It’s a solid debut and I highly recommend it.
According to Merriam-Webster, crux is “a puzzling or difficult problem: an unsolved question; an essential point requiring resolution or resolving an outcome; a main or central feature”.
Gabriel Tallent’s novel, Crux, comes nine years after his debut, the much lauded My Absolute Darling. Crux landed on the top of my must read pile based on my love for his debut and now that I have read it, it cements Tallent’s place in my auto buy list. (I hope I won’t have to wait another nine years for is next book!)
For Tamma and Dan, seventeen-year-old besties, a crux is a metaphor for the difficulties and decisions they face in their everyday lives, but also the very real problems they encounter every time they head out into the Mojave to climb boulders.
These kids live next door to each other in the middle of nowhere. Their mothers, Alexandra and Kendra, used to be best friends until they had a falling out and now no longer speak. Alexandra wrote a best-selling novel when she was eighteen. She married Lawrence, a construction worker, and had Dan. Kendra is a diner waitress and, besides Tamma, is mother to Sierra (who has three kids of her own) and Colin. She lives with a dirtbag drug dealer ten years younger than her in a ratchety trailer. Neither Dan nor Tamma’s home lives are particular stellar. Dan and his father don’t really have much to say to each other; Alexandra barely comes out of her room. She had heart valve replacement surgery years ago, and the valve is now deteriorating. Although she did write a second novel, she’s been blocked ever since. Kendra is deplorable. Whether it’s the circumstances of her own life or she’s just an awful person, she is not kind to Tamma. On the rare occasions Tamma would be in Dan’s house, Dan would “catch Tamma eating orange peels. Chewing steak bones from the night before. She’d nab butter off the stick. […] “Dude,” he’d whisper, meaning, That bread is moldy, and “Dude,” she’d say back, meaning, Don’t worry, I scraped the mold off.”
Tamma and Dan spend as much time out in the desert as they can. They don’t have the right gear, but they climb anyway, spotting each other and egging each other on and challenging each other to climb more difficult rocks. “On the ground, Tamma was the clumsiest person he had ever met, but on the wall, she was breathtaking. […] Everyone he knew seemed to think Tamma was trash, but he thought she was some kind of genius.”
The teens have a dream, and that is to graduate from high school (although it is highly unlikely Tamma will graduate, Dan is a whipsmart scholar) and head to Indian Creek, “the last place on earth you can still dirtbag, the way the old-school climbers did.” The friends dream about perhaps going pro, making a living doing the thing that they love the best of all.
But life seems to have other plans for them.
Dan’s mother has a life-threatening medical issue. Tamma’s baby nephew, River, has a traumatic brain injury. Suddenly the pair find themselves having to reassess their lives and priorities. Their choices will have a profound impact on their lives.
Tamma couldn’t say that she’d never despair. All she could do was think, Not today. All her hope felt terribly insecure. And she could get to where she had this feeling of rage. I don’t want to be strong. I don’t want to have to try and find joy when it all feels so scary. And then she’d think: You can do this. You are a rad climber and people like you. You can show up every day and be an indomitable force for joy and hope and you can let everyone else fall apart without falling apart yourself.
Dan has his own struggles, but he knows that his parents “believed that it was possible for [him] to go out into the world and succeed. That belief was built into [his] worldview. No one had ever believed that about Tamma.”
Boulders aren’t the only things Tamma and Dan have to climb; life is going to shoot the motherlode of obstacles their way. How they ultimately handle these trials is what makes these characters people you want to root for. Their friendship is genuine and refreshing; their conversations often laugh-out-loud funny; their love and admiration for each other is real and beautiful.
There is a lot of climbing jargon in this book and that might not be to everyone’s taste. I don’t know a dang thing about climbing, but by the end of it I was invested in their pursuit of “sending” each climb they attempted. I loved Crux. It’s my first five star read of 2026.
Just before my daughter and I went to see Emerald Fennell’s movie “Wuthering Heights”, I decided to re-read Emily Brontë’s one and only novel, Wuthering Heights. The novel was published in 1847, just one year before Emily, a reclusive spinster, died at the age of 30. Critic V.S. Pritchett said “There is no other novel in the English language like Wuthering Heights“. Indeed, the novel has endured for 179 years and, if nothing else, might expect an uptick in readers based on Fennell’s movie. New readers, however, are likely to be flummoxed.
I read Wuthering Heights for the first time when I was in high school, so 50 years ago. My memories of it going into this re-read were of Catherine and Heathcliff, tortured lovers on the moors of Yorkshire. I always credit this novel for setting up my romantic expectations/aspirations, which may explain why I have always been drawn to angsty love affairs: couples who love each other but can’t be together, or lovers who shouldn’t love each other but do, are totally my romantic jam. Probably also explains why I am single. My romantic expectations were skewed at an early age.
In my memory, Catherine and Heathcliff were passionately in love with each other, but he wasn’t the right guy for her socially; she needed to marry up the social ladder. Enter Edgar Linton. What I didn’t remember was that Catherine was dead by page 200 and for the rest of his miserable life, Heathcliff tries to ruin the lives of everyone around him including his son, Linton, and Catherine’s daughter, Cathy.
As a teenager, I saw Wuthering Heights as a tragic but ultimately romantic love story, but upon re-reading I discovered it’s slightly more complicated than that.
Catherine and Heathcliff’s story is told to Mr. Lockwood, a lodger at Thrushcross Grange, who falls ill and convalesces under the care of Ellen “Nelly” Dean, housekeeper at both Thrushcross and Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw’s family home. She tells Mr. Lockwood about how Mr. Earnshaw, in an act of benevolence, plucks Heathcliff from the streets and brings him back to Wuthering Heights, “a sullen, patient child; hardened, perhaps to ill-treatment”, ill-treatment which he further endures at the hands of Catherine’s older brother, Hindley, the most odious of characters.
Catherine takes an immediate shine to Heathcliff. “”She was much too fond of Heathcliff,” Nelly tells Mr. Lockwood. “”The greatest punishment we could invent for her was to keep her separate from him””. They pass their childhoods running wild on the heath.
Catherine has a willful streak and a fiery temper; she is no shrinking violet. In fact, even Mr. Earnshaw favoured Heathcliff over his own daughter “who was too mischievous and wayward for a favourite.”
Certainly, she had ways with her such as I never saw a child take up before; and she put all of us past our patience fifty times and oftener in a day: from the hour she came downstairs till the hour she went to bed, we had not a minute’s security that she wouldn’t be in mischief. Her spirits were always at high-water mark, her tongue always going–singing, laughing, and plaguing everybody who would not do the same. A wild, wicked slip she was–but she had the bonniest eye, the sweetest smile, and the lightest foot in the parish; and, after all, I believe she meant no harm.
When Edgar Linton asks Catherine to marry him, she tells Nelly “I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven […] It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that’s not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
So, she does marry Edgar and moves to the palatial Thrushcross Grange to live with him and his sister, Isabella. Heathcliff disappears and when he reappears, three years later, he is much changed.
He had grown a tall, athletic, well-formed man; beside whom my master seemed quite slender and youth-like. His upright carriage suggested the idea of his having been in the army. His countenance was much older in expression and decision of feature than Mr. Linton’s; it looked intelligent, and retained no marks of his former degradation. A half-civilized ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified: quite divested of roughness, though too stern for grace.
His reappearance shakes up everyone. To Edgar Linton, Heathcliff was nothing more than “the gypsy–the ploughboy” but, well, we know what Catherine thought of him. Surely, this will not end well.
And, of course, it doesn’t.
The vitriol against Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of what she says is her favourite book of all time is both deserved and undeserved. “Wuthering Heights” is Wuthering Heights adjacent; it is not a faithful adaptation of the book. My daughter, who is 28, loved the movie. She sobbed for the last fifteen minutes. She has never read the book.
Fennell encountered the book when she was about 14, so a similar age to my first exposure. I think she saw something similar to what I saw when I first read it: a great love story. Her movie is fanfiction, really, because it imagines (in a kind of annoying music video montage), a lot more sex than exists in the novel. In fact, Heathcliff and Catherine are never physically intimate in the book. The on-screen sex is not graphic, despite one of my friends calling it “porny.” As an avid consumer of fanfiction back in the day, I know how graphic writers can be when describing what they ‘imagine’ happens when the source material fades to black–and truthfully, that’s what Fennell is doing here–but what we see on screen is pretty tame; nary a breast or a butt.
It also portrays Nelly as the villain of the piece; she deliberately coaxes from Catherine the confession that she can’t marry Heathcliff because he is beneath her when she knows that Heathcliff will hear, but he doesn’t hear when Catherine says she loves him or see how tortured she is about the decision. Hindley doesn’t exist in this version. Isabella is played for laughs and as a submissive in a bizarre scene where she is chained up in Heathcliff’s house and barks like a dog.
Another criticism of the movie is the casting. Margot Robbie is 35; Catherine was 18 or 19 when she died in childbirth. Jacob Elordi is not by any stretch (and at 6’5″ there’s a lot of stretching to be done) a “dark-skinned gipsy”. But I didn’t care too much about that because both of these people can actually act and they are beautiful to look at and since the movie isn’t *really* Wuthering Heights, I was content to let the whole thing play out. Yes, I understand this is problematic whitewashing, but it was clear to me that Fennell was making a version, her 14-year-old wishful thinking version, of the book. For example, the actor who plays Edgar Linton is played by Shazad Latif, who is by no means the insipid Edgar I imagined. In the book he is described as light-skinned, blue-eyed, and slender. So, make of that what you will.
The whole movie is beautiful, really, but certainly not the Wuthering Heights of my teenage imagination. (In fact Wuthering Heights, the house, looked like it was made of plastic. It was weird.) The costumes, the landscape, the overall aesthetic was easy on the eyes. But the movie doesn’t demand anything of you beyond your belief that Heathcliff and Catherine love each other. That’s what I believed at 15.
Maybe now I think their relationship is more obsessive, complicated, and toxic, but I will not deny that I still find the tale hopelessly romantic even though Catherine and Heathcliff are not especially likeable and are certainly, on occasion, horrible to each other and others. The movie doesn’t portray anything beyond Catherine’s death, but the book still has 200 pages to go after she dies and in those pages we see Heathcliff destroy everything in his path. Does he do it because of grief? Eighteen years after her death, he admits to Nelly that he bribed a sexton to open her coffin, and when he saw her face again “it was hers yet.”
…she has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years–incessantly–remorselessly. […] I felt Cathy was there: not under me, but on the earth. A sudden sense of relief flowed from my heart through every limb. I relinquished my labour of agony, and turned consoled at once: it remained while I refilled the grave, and led me home.
Emily Brontë’s novel is a masterpiece of mood, passion, and tension. In her introduction to the Modern Library edition of the novel, Diane Johnson writes: “In their rage and frustration at the impediments that society and conventional morality impose on them, preventing the perfect expression of the erotic life force they embody, the two lovers symbolize the ultimate tragedy of man’s earthly condition.”
Emerald Fennell’s movie is Wuthering Heights for the TikTok generation. I enjoyed watching it, but I enjoyed my re-read far more.
I think your enjoyment of Holly Brickley’s debut novel Deep Cuts will very much depend on how much you love music…and not just in a casual way but in an all-consuming, possessive, nerdy way.
Percy and Joe meet at a campus bar in Berkeley in 2000. They are both students and peripherally known to each other “in that vague way you can know people in college, without ever having been introduced or had a conversation.”
Then “Sara Smile” comes on while they are both waiting for drinks and it kicks off a conversation about the difference between a perfect track and a perfect song. Apparently, there is a difference. Percy explains:
“A perfect song has stronger bones. Lyrics. Chords. Melody. It can be played differently, produced differently, and it will almost always be great. Take ‘Both Sides, Now,’ if you’ll excuse me being a girl in a bar talking about Joni Mitchell–any singer who doesn’t suck can cover that song and you’ll be drowning in goosebumps, right?
[…]
“Now, ‘Sara Smile’–can you imagine anyone besides Daryl Hall singing this, exactly as he sang it on this particular day?”
Joe is an aspiring musician and Percy a writer and their meet cute morphs into a decade long will they/won’t they, should they/shouldn’t they relationship. Joe has a girlfriend, Zoe, “a tasteful punk”. Joe describes their relationship to Percy as “a perfect track [because you] need the context–family, friends, our hometown.” Soon, the three are hanging out together, although it’s clear that Percy has a thing for Joe.
Joe asks for Percy’s advice about some of his music and Percy is nothing if she isn’t honest. She tells him his song “is over-written [and] kind of forced” but that his singing is “magical.” Joe comes to depend on this honesty as he starts to chase a professional musical career.
When Zoe and Joe break up and Zoe gives Percy her blessing to make her move, things are further complicated because Joe, it seems, doesn’t want to mess up this musical partnership the two have going. Thus the will they/won’t they. Their lives pull them in different directions after college, but they are besties (without the benefits) until one night at a wedding when they suddenly aren’t.
I enjoyed Deep Cuts well enough. I did find all the song references tedious, but that didn’t stop me from making a playlist. I found Joe and Percy sort of tedious, too, but only in that way many kids in their 20s are – especially as seen from the viewpoint of someone in their 60s. I suspect that had I read this book in my 20s, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy this. I loved the angst; I enjoyed some of the secondary characters. The dialogue felt authentic and so did the 20-something navel gazing.
Life itself provides some deep cuts of its own. Mistakes are made. Feelings are hurt. Friendships ebb and flow. By the end of the book I was trying to decide if Percy and Joe actually should or shouldn’t be together. They hurt each other, but they love each other, too. Like any great song, they are a sum of all their parts.
The Ludic Reader 