The Angels of Sinkhole County is a humorous story about death and deception set in Appalachia.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“The stark impossibility of Loretta’s gambit is part of the book’s farcical strength. This is an impressively subtle novel—brimming with comedic sharpness, but also a sweet but unsentimental glimpse into the strange ways love expresses itself in the real world.”
In her own words, here is Deborah Clearman’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Angels of Sinkhole County:
The Angels of Sinkhole County is a work of fiction. Implausible events abound, some more obvious than others, but my novel is based on the very real and personal experience of shepherding my parents toward their graves in their last years, giving them as much comfort as I could over long distance phone calls and frequent visits. Music was important in my family and comes into the novel. My father was an active and emotional listener, mostly to classical music. His mother had been a professional violinist. My taste is more varied, and less sophisticated. Music carried me through the long drive from New York City to southern West Virginia, which became a ritual of listening to the same songs, stopping at the same rest stops, meditating, mourning, and trying to stay awake.
“Woke Up This Morning” by British band Alabama 3 from the 1997 album Exile on Coldharbour Lane, opening theme music for the television series The Sopranos. I start out from Manhattan on the 500-mile drive to visit my aging parents. I have a playlist for this grueling solo drive and it begins when I emerge from the Holland Tunnel into Mafia country. The propulsive hip-hop beat and dark lyrics—“You woke up this morning/ Got yourself a gun,/ Mama always said you’d be/ The Chosen One”—energize me. Ten hours to go.
“The Long and Winding Road” by the Beatles, 1970. As I leave urban New Jersey behind my journey spools out across rural Pennsylvania, and I fall into a wistful mood. Caring for my parents has brought me back to my childhood. In the 60s I was a Beatlemaniac, and their breakup after Let It Be broke my heart. The anguish and nostalgia in this ballad expresses this poignant time in my life. With the passing of the older generation, the past can never be recovered.
“Me gustas tú” by Manu Chao, a European polyglot who sings in French, Spanish, English, Italian, Arabic, Catalan, and other languages. I first ran across his album Esperanza in a funky bar in the high mountains of Guatemala, in a year that changed my life. His joyful wordplay lifts me out of nostalgia and I sing along, trying to slip as gracefully between languages as he does. “Qué voy a hacer?, je ne sais pas/ Qué voy a hacer?, je ne sais plus/ Qué voy a hacer? je suis perdu./ Qué horas son, mi corazón?”
It was my father who endowed me with my love of languages from a very young age, sprinkling our lively family conversations with as many fragments of German, French, or Latin as he could muster.
“Country Roads” by John Denver. Crossing the border into Maryland I honk my horn in honor of my home state (Do I have a home state?) and quickly cross another border into the West Virginia panhandle. (West Virginia is the only state with two panhandles). John Denver’s song has become West Virginia’s state anthem, although a close look at the song’s lyrics place it more accurately in western Virginia, home of the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River. Never mind. When my family moved to West Virginia in 1970, they found their “almost heaven.”
“Oh Shenandoah” folk song. The interstate sweeps southward down the broad Shenandoah Valley. The Blue Ridge rises on my left, and the Allegheny Mountains on my right. I’m getting sleepy, so it’s time to turn off the car stereo and sing myself awake. My mother and I loved to sing together when I was a kid growing up in the country. We sang on long walks and car rides or sitting around the campfire. She taught me old favorites from bygone days. I’m thinking of her as I belt out “Wayhay, you rolling river.”
“There but for Fortune” by Joan Baez. Phil Ochs wrote this song, but it was the Joan Baez cover that I memorized, along with whole albums by Joan when I was a dreamy teenager. “Show me the prison, show me the jail . . . there but for fortune, go you or I.” Its sentiment became my lifelong mantra. The song comes to city slicker Ruth in The Angels of Sinkhole County when she visits one of her father’s caregivers and admires the lives of “country people struggling against poverty, drugs, and changing times, always one bad break away from disaster.”
“Up Above My Head” by the Nashville Bluegrass Band from their album My Native Home. I’ve come to the last fifty miles of the 500. I leave the interstate for smaller and smaller two-lane blacktops, called byways in West Virginia. It’s twilight, the deer strike hour, and I’m on the alert. Now that I’m in the heart of Appalachia, it’s time to celebrate with bluegrass. I love the banjo and country fiddle. But my favorite song on the album is the first—the four members of the band singing a cappella, “I hear music in the air/ And I really do believe/ There’s a Heaven somewhere.” I believe I’m there.
“Dover Beach” by Samuel Barber. In 1931 the American composer, baritone singer, and pianist Samuel Barber, then 21 years old, set the descriptive poem by the Victorian English poet Matthew Arnold to music for voice and string quartet. Major Thorndike, the patriarch who dies in the first chapter of The Angels of Sinkhole County, usually preferred instrumental music to voice, but he loved “Dover Beach” for the darkness of its lyrics as well as the harmonic language of its formal structure. He had a recording of Barber himself singing with the Curtis String Quartet. His caregivers learned to appreciate this unfamiliar style of music through their affection for him.
After Major’s wife of 63 years died, Major had been known to weep over the last verse:
“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Not certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
“Pictures at an Exhibition” by Mussorgsky. In a climactic chapter of the novel, Major Thorndike’s son Hume, who is by now aware that his father has been switched out for a double, plays a CD for his alleged father of this orchestration of a piano suite in ten movements originally written by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. While giving the old man a mini music appreciation lesson, Hume describes each scene the music is intended to portray. “Mussorgsky illustrates a wacky assortment of images—a ballet of unhatched chicks, a children’s quarrel after games, spooky catacombs, rattling carts, and a hut belonging to Baby Yaga, who was a scary old woman in Russian folklore.” These are the paintings at an exhibition by a friend of Mussorgsky’s, who had recently died, Hume explains. The old man, a victim of stroke, listens without speaking and the tension builds as Hume wonders what is on his mind and how they are going to get out of the impossible deception the caregivers have orchestrated. The piece ends with crashing cymbals and a blast of horns in the movement known as “The Great Gate at Kiev.”
Deborah Clearman’s most recent novel is The Angels of Sinkhole County. She is the author of two other novels, Remedios and Todos Santos, and a collection of short fiction, Concepción and the Baby Brokers, all set in the mountains of rural Guatemala. She wrote and illustrated a children’s book, The Goose’s Tale, which takes place in a marshy tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals.