Craig Willse’s novel Providence is an intense and compelling debut.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Willse debuts with a consuming psychological thriller that turns familiar tropes of dark academia and fatal attraction on their heads….The result is a memorable, steamy, and accomplished queer thriller.”
In his own words, here is Craig Willse’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Providence:
Making mixtapes for friends and crushes during my analog teenage years was, for me, an obsessive and all-consuming project. Cassettes scattered across my bedroom floor, I spent hours just listening to potential songs and making notes: plotting a seamless flow, tracking shifts in rhythm and speed, listening for resonance across lyrics and themes. I’d use a stopwatch to time the length of tracks so I could come as close as possible to the 45-minutes that constituted one side of a tape. I would record a song, then the next, then rewind and play the transition to feel how it did or did not work, often scrapping it and starting over. (It occurs to me this isn’t so different from making a novel: cajoling the various elements into one cohesive thing.) This is all to say, it took me months to complete this playlist, as I tried to make a satisfying listen that also told the story of Providence (of sadness, sex, and despair). We are inside the narrator Mark’s head in the story, and so I imagined a mix he might compose, not aware perhaps of how much his choices would reveal – the messy, unexamined id of it all.
“Looking for Knives,” by DYAN
This cinematic song feels like the perfect opener, expressing the loneliness and ennui of Mark’s life on the tenure track in a small town with these plaintive lines: “I went looking for body / But they’re giving me thin / I was hoping to sail through / But they’re making me swim.” As the song’s title repeats in a looping incantation, you have to ask – why are you out there, looking for knives? The reason, of course, is obvious: “I was looking for knives / I was looking for you.”
“Boy Problems,” by Carly Rae Jepsen
Boy problems, amirite? The genius of Jepsen, though, is the turn: the problem at the heart of the song is the loss of a best friend who gets sick of listening to you monologue about some shitty guy. I can’t help but think of Mark and Safie’s friendship. When I told my downstairs neighbor I was working on this playlist, he said: “It better not be all Carly Rae.” But it could have been. Hannif Abdurraquib said it best, writing about Jepsen’s work: “I will surely wake tomorrow with a desire for something I cannot have . . . .”
“Nothing Left to Lose,” by Everything But The Girl
For a few weeks at the start of 2023, I listened to nothing but this song, the stunning return of a band whose breakout single appeared when I, like Tyler, was in my first years of college. The blank-stared proclamation of nothing left to lose – “Kiss me while the world decays / Kiss me while the music plays” – is exactly the Molotov cocktail of longing and nihilism that ignites Mark. Or as Mark reflects, as his fate becomes inextricably bound to Tyler’s, “What was there to lose? Everything, it seemed, and nothing.”
“I’m On Fire,” by Chromatics
Voiced by Ruth Radelet, the sort of creepy daddy/little girl story gets complicated, a soft butch swagger luring the object of affection away. Uncontained desire meeting a promise of rescue. In my opinion, this is a perfect cover, revealing a layer of compulsion beneath seduction, and posing one of the central questions of culture today: who’s baby girl? But be warned – knives return, this one “edgy and dull / And cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my soul.”
“Cemetry Gates,” by The Smiths
This song kind of has all of Providence in it: gothic queer camaraderie, hidden histories, self accounts you can’t trust, the scholar’s passion, the deceit of the written word. And of course, Saint Oscar Wilde, whose words provide the book’s epigraph. I imagine this album among Mark’s sister Cassie’s records – and, like Mark, I would say it saved my adolescent self from fantasies of obliteration, the way only a song can make you feel not alone in the world.
“Kamikaze,” by Omar Apollo
An excellent and horny tune about a boy for whom you’d blow off work – and who could blame you? – with an “ass round like Cheerios.” If Apollo was around at the time of the book, I can imagine Tyler playing this for Mark, and Mark puzzling to make sense of what might be coded within that gentle, sexy crooning. But I wonder if Mark could even hear the song’s inevitable end: “Fuck you, boy.”
“Handsome Devil,” by The Ballet
A slow, dark build (penned by my grad school best friend) that reaches at its close a pitched delirium of joy that makes you wonder if the singer has listened to his own tale. The answer, of course, is no – as the chorus proudly proclaims: “I didn’t learn anything at all.”
“Vex Oh,” by KAYTRANADA
This feels like Mark, after his ill-fated trip to Columbus with Tyler (the second trip, because he didn’t learn anything at all after the first one): “Shoulda said bye Felica / Must have been the tequila.” Things are chaotic here, but at least we get to have a little fun and enjoy the party while it lasts.
“Love On The Brain,” by Rihanna
If there’s a better song about doing what you know you shouldn’t, I haven’t heard it. “Leaves me black and blue / but he fucks me so good.” And could there be a more futile act than fist fighting with fire? A searing account of the battles we jump into knowing, by jumping in, we’ve already lost.
“One of Your Girls,” by Troye Sivan
A text from my lifelong friend Rania: “I am obsessed with this song and have been listening to it on repeat for the past few days while I read your book and honestly I think it’s a perfect soundtrack.” As always, Rania was right, as things go from bad (“Give me a call if you ever get lonely”) to worse (“Give me a call if you ever get desperate”). And of course it only seemed fitting to get some demonic twink energy into the mix.
“Not In Love,” by Crystal Castles
This song evokes the friend in “Boy Problems,” finally fed up with your nonsense, slapping you across the face. Some tough love about love. With Robert Smith on dusky vocals, I’m thinking of Cassie once again and of how she would love this song and play it so loud it would drive their mother insane.
“A Case of You,” by James Blake
Cassie again: Only when putting this mix together did it occur to me that this song was in my head somewhere when Mark, at a hotel bar in Chicago, talks with a woman in whose smile he catches a glimpse of Cassie. (“I met a woman / She had a mouth like yours.”) I think that scene is one of my favorites, and I hope my cover (like Blake’s) does the original justice.
“Good Guy,” by Frank Ocean
This is meant to close the mix like a Shakespearean post-script. At just over one minute long, it’s a perfect little poem that evokes so much: a magic visit to New York City, gay bars, cell phones, the fantasy of a first meeting, the crash of reality: “I, the first time I’d ever saw you / And you text nothing like you look.” Ocean leaves us with the lingering questions of Providence: Is anyone the good guy here? And if so, would we even know him when we saw him?
Craig Willse was a 2021 Lambda Literary Fellow. He received his PhD in Sociology from CUNY Graduate Center. He has written for Joyland, Fence, and HAD, among others, and this is his first novel.