Jen Silverman’s There’s Going to Be Trouble is the rare novel that is as exciting as it is thought-provoking.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Atmospheric and profound, Silverman’s novel of defiance and acceptance shimmers with passion, repressed and unbridled.”
In their own words, here is Jen Silverman’s Book Notes music playlist for their novel There’s Going to Be Trouble:
There’s Going to Be Trouble is a novel about protest, love, and how we live with the consequences of family secrets. It tells the story of an American woman who flees her small-town teaching position after making a decision that ends up imploding her life. She lands in 2018 Paris, in the early weeks of the Yellow Vest protests, and falls in love with a radical activist. And it tells the story of a man who is enrolled in a chemistry PhD program, avoiding the Vietnam draft, until his involvement in the 1968 Harvard student protests ends up having dangerous and far-reaching consequences. Between the first draft and the final one, I found myself in a series of different cities and countries. The playlist below makes me think not only of the book and the terrain it covers, but also my journey of writing it.
1. Erik Satie – Gnossienne No. 5: No. 1 Lent
Paris. My partner Dane and I are walking through the winding streets near the Pantheon when it starts raining. As we look for shelter, we pass a small chapel where a piano concert is about to start. We join a small group of people clustered onto wooden folding chairs. Partway through the concert, the pianist starts playing The Gnossiennes– deceptively simple, yet astonishing in their depth and complexity. I begin to imagine my protagonist, Minnow wandering through this neighborhood, which is her neighborhood — and which, when I have lived in Paris, has always been mine. I imagine her sitting in this chapel, falling in love.
2. Måneskin – Torna a Casa (from Il ballo della vita)
3. Antytila’s album Hello
MacDowell residency, New Hampshire. Winter. The very first Omicron surge tears through, and we all end up in quarantine in our cabins. I write the first draft over five weeks, in an intoxicating, single-minded free-fall through hours and days, late into the night — sometimes all night. By the end of my residency, I have written the entire thing (though large sections won’t survive the next several drafts.) It snows heavily and I play two albums on repeat—one by an Italian band with excellent eyeliner, and one by a Ukrainian band who are currently soldiers by necessity. On the walls of Garland Studio, index cards and maps proliferate. Every morning I walk around my cabin reading the walls.
4. Joni Mitchell – Free Man in Paris
Upstate New York. Dane and I have slipped off the grid before the next set of theatre and TV jobs kick in. I’m doing a third or fourth pass on the draft, responding to my editor’s notes. I’ve been listening to Joni Mitchell as I rework the parts of the novel set in 1960s Boston. Dane gets used to Joni Mitchell playing, even in the evenings when we’ve both stopped work for the day.
5. Indila – Dernière Danse
6. Amarae – Co-Star
Tokyo. I’m a writer-producer on the second season of the televison show Tokyo Vice, and I’m living in Tokyo for a few months. Most days, I’m on set; on my days off, I play Indila and Amarae on my tinny computer speakers. There’s Going to Be Trouble copy-edits land in my inbox three weeks into the shoot. After a work-day spent switching between English and Japanese, there is something surprisingly meditative about going through the manuscript and rewriting certain sections, stripping the sentences back to their bones and then building them forward again. I am thinking a lot about language, because I am living between two of them. There is a vivid pleasure in copy-editing that I hadn’t found before.
7. David Bowie – Cat People (Putting Out Fire)
NYC. This is technically home, though I haven’t been here much over the past year. I’m in a workshop for my new play Spain– a week-long work session with actors, in advance of the fall production – when the next round of edits lands. The city is chaotic; the Writers Guild is on strike so all TV and film work is on ice. I try to summon the meditative copy-editing joy I had in Tokyo, but mostly I feel unhinged and kind of alien, like I don’t remember how to be on the planet correctly. Sometimes when I get out of rehearsal, I lie on my apartment floor and play David Bowie. David Bowie makes it seem like being an extraterrestrial is the most normal thing in the world.
8. Kalash – Mwaka Moon
Paris again. Dane and I spend most days outside, walking. Fragments of sound stick to me – often French rap from passing cars or balconies where young people smoke and bask in the summer sun. I give an ARC (advanced reader copy) to my friend Nick, who is visiting Paris for the first time. Nick bikes around Paris, sending me photos in which the book lives on café tables next to delicate espressos or glasses of wine. Seeing the book in someone else’s hands, all over the city, feels like a blessing of a kind – or a release. I’ve given it everything I could. Now it gets to live on its own.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Jen Silverman’s playlist for her novel We Play Ourselves
Jen Silverman’s Playlist for her story collection The Island Dwellers
Jen Silverman is the author of a novel We Play Ourselves, a Lambda Literary Award finalist; the story collection The Island Dwellers, longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction; and the poetry chapbook Bath. Their honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.