Megan Staffel’s novel The Causative Factor is as haunting as it is compelling.
Andrea Barrett wrote of the book:
“Suspenseful, original, and full of heart, this novel gripped me from the first page and continued to surprise me throughout. What does it mean to make a life, to make art, to make a life making art? I’ll always remember these characters and their complex paths.”
In her own words, here is Megan Staffel’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Causative Factor:
My new novel, The Causative Factor, was inspired by two experiences: going for a walk at a state park with my husband one autumn afternoon, and listening to two musician friends do a beautiful rendition of the Everly Brothers song, “Let It Be Me.” Several years later, after the mysterious alchemy of the fictional process, I have a novel about two lovers, Rachel and Rubiat, who begin a passionate relationship while at art school only to be separated when Rubiat gives in to a reckless and self-destructive impulse while they’re visiting a state park.
What I’ve chosen for the playlist is an eclectic blend of jazz, classical, and pop that works as an audible narrative of different scenes in the book. These are clearly afterthoughts because while I’m writing I need total silence, but even so, the music shares such a similar landscape with the text it’s hard to believe it wasn’t present from the beginning. In the effort to explain how the playlist functions as an audible narrative, I was careful not to give away the central mystery of the novel, but I soon discovered that if I focused on the music, the section of the novel it represented would be described as well. At least, that’s my hope. Here goes:
Ben Webster’s tenor saxophone jazz number, “Soulville,” evokes happy, sexy feelings and could be the soundtrack for the opening of the novel when Rachel and Rubiat are giddy with an unexpressed interior excitement and then move into the expansive, melty feeling of wanting to open themselves completely and give unbounded sexual pleasure to the other. It is a single night that will be seared into Rachel’s memory and the buttery softness of Webster’s sax captures the complete abandonment of time and anxiety as two people discover and express their deepest desires.
In the second movement, allegro ma non troppo, of Prokofiev’s piano concerto #3 in C major, Opus 26, there is a tense dialogue between the piano and orchestra. Heavy on the strings, the orchestra tends to counter the piano’s loud, discordant, riotous energy with calmer and more soothing tones. In my mind, the orchestra represents Rachel and the state park where they go the next day to take a hike along the cliffs of a gorge, while the strident, unruly piano is Rubiat. The park is where the impulse visits him and in the powerful crescendo at the end, I can feel how he fights against the voices of reason and love, overcoming them finally at the music’s crescendo which is where he gives in to a mad, self-destructive impulse that Rachel, who has wandered off for a few minutes, comes back in time to witness.
Bach’s Partita #6 in E Minor comes next as Rachel tries to find her footing after viewing Rubiat’s horrifying act. She has moved to New York City where she settles in Queens and finds a job teaching English to immigrants. But even there, she finds that Rubiat’s act shadows everything, and so she turns to the only thing she knows, she starts making art. Very tentatively, taking small, hesitant steps, she begins a body of work to express the enormity of what she saw. As the piano moves forward, then back tracks, step by hesitant step, trying out different sounds, sometimes playing chords, sometimes a happy run of notes, sometimes coming to a full stop, it mimics the questioning and doubt that Rachel faces in her new situation.
“Small Fry” by Junior Manse is a jazz version of the same tentative, trial and error process and this parallels a later scene where the healing forces of the natural world are at play, so there is more surety and the sounds are larger, happier and more fluid. Junior Manse on the piano makes small moves, but there’s a true joyousness in this risky business as the piano steps out. The bass adds steadiness, the drums give support, and the blending of these sounds mirrors the experience of a character feeling safe and moving easily in a natural setting, getting to know all the elements of a small piece of land, its streams, grasses, and wildlife.
I have always loved Joan Osborne’s song, “One of Us.” In the old days, when I spent a lot of time driving my children to various activities, I’d tune into a station on the radio and around the holidays “One of Us” would get a lot of airtime. Back then, I loved the chance element of radio; that lift when a song I liked came on was worth the boredom of listening to other music I didn’t especially connect to. “One of Us” with its refrain,
What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin’ to make his way home?
represents a section of the novel when Rachel struggles with loneliness after being dumped by a boyfriend. At this stage, her feelings about Rubiat are clearer. She’s gotten over her anger about what he’d done and now she can remember the magnetism she’d felt. She’s able to see him in an almost sacred light as she comes to realize that she needs to find out what happened to him. This song captures her new understanding that Rubiat is imbued with a spirit she wants to be close to again, if possible. She wants him to be alive and well, and she wants to find him if he is. Osborne’s scratchy voice and the restraint of the music while she sings the refrain just makes the return of the full melody only more joyous and powerful.
The song, “Let It Be Me,” is the only music that has a role in the novel. It appears in a crucial scene when Rachel sings it acapella in a restaurant and the demo version on Spotify, sung by George Harrison, comes closest to capturing the unpracticed, spontaneous singing of a woman who is trying to embarrass her companion. Although Rachel doesn’t have a guitar in the scene in the novel, she is imagining someone strumming an accompaniment as she gets up from her table and, to everyone’s astonishment, including her own, stands among the crowded tables and sings.
Aaron Copeland’s “Hoe Down” from Rodeo is a composition I heard recently at a concert. Almost as soon as it began, I realized that it perfectly described the atmosphere I wanted to evoke at the end of the novel when the characters, though outwardly guarded and tentative, are feeling, inside of themselves, a burgeoning happiness that reasonableness and caution can’t squelch. It’s this inner state that the triumphant music of “Hoe Down” suggests. There are the cantering horses of the strings and percussion section; they are like a wildly beating heart, and there are also the slow downs and hesitations when the melody seems to fizzle out, but then, with a clash of the cymbals, and an exuberant sawing of the violins, starts up again. That rhythm, alternating between an excited high and a careful, searching low, reflects the natural rhythm of the inner joy I wanted to evoke. The sense of triumph and possibility can’t be restrained and that’s the feeling, I hope, at the end of my novel and what this wild, boisterous piece of music is all about.
Megan Staffel is the author of six books of fiction. Her most recent is a novel called The Causative Factor, published in 2024. Please visit her website to learn more: www.meganstaffel.com