In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Ann Packer’s new novel Some Bright Nowhere is one of the year’s most resonant novels, thoughtfully written and deeply profound.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Packer’s gorgeous, deeply involving novel is a suspenseful and radiant reckoning with love, sorrow, and the everlasting mystery of death.”
In his own words, here is Michael Chabon’s Book Notes playlist for Ann Packer’s novel Some Bright Nowhere:
1.
If you had dropped by Tragic Magic HQ a few weeks ago, you would have found me sprawled in the conversation pit, awash in the tragic magic of Ann Packer’s beautiful new novel, Some Bright Nowhere. I tend to be a slow reader, by habit more than by nature; when the writing is as good as Ann’s, I like to take my time with the sentences. But I could not seem to hold myself back. I devoured the book in two intense sessions, and then when I was finished—when it was finished with me—I just sat there, for a long time, ashiver with the resonance of its powerful final pages, a struck wine glass on the verge of shattering.
Tragic Magic HQ
I don’t know how long I stayed like that: a couple of days, at least. Sure, I got up, I walked around, I ate things and went places. But wherever I went and whatever I was doing, Some Bright Nowhere stayed with me. I kept thinking about the novel’s pivotal moment and profoundest mystery—a woman’s shocking and seemingly unaccountable dying wish. What makes that mystery so profound is not that it shocks, hurts, and puzzles Eliot—from whose POV the entire story is told—but rather the way it obliterates a loving and attentive husband’s unexamined certainty that, after so many years of marriage and of caring for Claire through the inexorable progress of her multiple cancers, he has every right to believe that he knows her. She ought to be incapable of taking him, and so painfully, by surprise.
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Stowed away in the hold of any enduring marriage, despite the mutual expertise gathered lovingly, painfully, or simply by dint of Gladwell’s famous “ten thousand hours,” there is always a black box: a record of unstated premises, silent refusals, pardon withheld, desire repressed, truth unacknowledged. Only in literature, through the artistry and tenacity of a great novelist like Ann Packer, can that black box ever be salvaged, and broken open, its contents thrillingly exposed.
Another mystery: black boxes are red.
I was still pondering all this a week later when I noticed the blue lightbulbs blinking in the eye-sockets of the bust of Lester Bangs over the airlock, between the epic twenty-foot mural that interlinks every single Pete Frame “Rock Family Tree” and a mounted pair of authentic concert-twirled Neil Peart ProMark oak drumsticks. Longtime subscribers to Tragic Magic may recall what that means: somewhere, someone was having a Mixtape Emergency.
2.
Over the years, reaching way back to the cassette era, I’ve made a lot of mixtapes and playlists for other people: as gifts and love offerings, courtship gestures, mementos, nostalgic reminders of a shared history, expressions of friendship and affection, and tools for properly educating my kids (along with any other souls in need of musical guidance).
I don’t, however, get a ton of what you might call “commissions.” Of all the cassettes, CD-Rs, and links to streaming playlists I’ve ever shared, very few of them were ever actually, well, requests. And I’ll be honest: sometimes that gives me pause; I can’t help remembering my Bubbie and her cookies.
“Bubbie.” Sadie Werbow, 1895–1977
My mother’s maternal grandmother showed up to every family event or dinner with a tin of her special “Bubbie Cookies,” carefully packed between sheets of waxed paper, made with loving intention and, alas, with flavorless parve oils in place of butterfat, with non-dairy creamer instead of milk, with cheap cacao-free kosher “chocolate” chips, and (apparently, though probably not) with a cup or two of very fine sawdust. As the tin was opened, everybody would exclaim, but apart from my brother and me (who as a matter of principle were bound to eat any cookie or cookie-like object), nobody ever seemed, just then, to have saved enough room for a Bubbie Cookie. It was not until long after Bubbie’s death that my mother happened to allude, in passing, to its having been a universally if silently acknowledged truth, in my family, that Bubbie Cookies were pretty much inedible.
It’s not really that I think my playlists are sawdusty and unlistenable. But I worry, sometimes, that nobody really wants them. If they did, wouldn’t they, at least occasionally, ask?
And if requests are rare, genuine mixtape emergencies are rarer still. There was the friend, left reeling after the truly horrendous breakup of a seven-year relationship, who said she needed a soundtrack that would map and accompany her upcoming journey out of the darkness and back into the light. And there was my exhausted and despairing wife, on the morning after 11/8/2016, needing a fistful of anthems to help her get her fight back.
I was pretty excited, therefore, when those blue LEDs lit up in the eyes of Lester Bangs. I was needed! Somebody wanted some of my Bubbie Cookies! But I was even more excited when I discovered that, this time, the call was coming in from—of all people—Ann Packer, whose novel was still sending little aftershocks through me.
3.
Ann and I have been friends for a span that will soon be measurable in decades, and I’ve been an admirer of her work for even longer—ever since 2002 when, during one of our semi-regular lunches at the Washington Square Bar & Grill, my dear teacher and mentor, the late Oakley Hall (1920–2008), told me about a new novel he’d been reading, a debut, called The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, using the formula he always used for his strongest possible recommendations: “I thought it was terrific!”
Apparently the only photograph ever taken (by Deb Copaken) of Ann Packer and me. Wedding of Sophie Chabon and Michael Massone, Brooksville, ME, 9/4/22
Like all her admirers and friends I’d been waiting a while for Some Bright Nowhere, and immediately on finishing it had sent Ann a burst of text messages telling her how it had transported me. She had replied, thanking me with typically droll and self-deprecating warmth. Now, however, she was texting me with a problem, a genuine mixtape emergency, which she encapsulated thus:
You know Largehearted Boy? I’ve been asked to create a playlist for Some Bright Nowhere, and I just can’t. I am, in fact, a longtime fan of Largehearted Boy, and have spent a decent amount of time, over the years, listening to his site’s “Book Notes,” where he invites authors to post playlists of musical selections that they listened to while writing their latest book, or that reflect or embody some key aspects of its setting or plot.1
There was, from Ann’s point of view, one problem with this proposal, and one possible solution:
Though I love music, I don’t think musically. Rather than simply say no thanks, it occurred to me: would you want to make one for me?Instantly—before I even switched off Lester Bang’s eye-bulbs or texted Ann back to say that I had her covered—I thought of Sufjan Stevens’s “Casimir Pulaski Day.” Like Some Bright Nowhere, the song tells the story of a person facing imminent decline and death, and how that imminence affects her and the people, family and friends, who love her. It’s exquisite and wrenching, like the book, accruing quiet power through the deployment of sharp, literary detail:
Goldenrod and the 4-H stone The things I brought you When I found out you had cancer of the bone
And, at the end:
In the morning, when you finally go And the nurse runs in with her head hung low And the cardinal hits the window
There was an immediate parallel, to me, as soon as I started to “think musically,” between the feel of Ann’s book and the song’s juxtaposition of delicate, aching, classical-tinged beauty (French horn) and a down-to-earth, clear-eyed, unsentimental approach to love, sex, death and questions of immortality (banjo).
In the end, “Casimir” didn’t make it to the final playlist, mostly because, as the reference to a “4-H stone” suggests, it’s (probably) about the premature death of a teenaged girl (her gender implied by a reference to her wearing a “blouse”). I went with a different Stevens track in the leadoff position, the almost too aptly-named “Death With Dignity,” from the album Carrie and Lowell. But here’s “Casimir Pulaski Day”2, anyway, because even though it fell off, it really set the tone for the playlist that eventually emerged. And because it’s sublimely beautiful:
Ann had expressed some trepidation that in assembling what I pitched to her as a “thematic” playlist (as opposed to, say, a selection of songs referred or alluded to in the book, of which, in this case, there were none), I might end up with, in her phrase, “a collection of dirges.” I had reassured her that I was not worried about that because, unlike Ann, I had not written the book, only read it, and thus I knew, from a kind of experience that will always be denied to a book’s long-suffering, anxiously fault-finding author, how thematically rich and multitonal her book was.
Some Bright Nowhere is so much more, I assured her, than a story (to paraphrase the opening sentence of Erich Segal’s Love Story) about a woman who died. It’s about: love of long duration,what goes on inside of marriages, the strength of female friendships, hurt and forgiveness, and looking back down the path that somehow has led us to this unforeseeable present moment with regret, puzzlement, and memories of exhilaration that are themselves, even now, exhilarating. And yes, it’s about death, but there are so many great songs about death that, like Ann’s novel, confront the mystery of our end with curiosity, courage, frankness, or even longing, but without feeling any particular need for dirges and lamentation.
As soon as I articulated all those motifs and themes, and Ann gave me her blessing, candidate songs came flooding out of my song-memory, sometimes in clutches of two and three, so fast that I could barely keep up. I had the whole thing selected and assembled within an hour or so, and then spent another couple of hours winnowing and deciding on the track order. It came together quickly, and I really do think it came out well. I don’t know if it “sounds like the book”—whatever that could mean—but it sounds, to me, like the way reading the book felt. The longest hour was the one I spent waiting to hear what Ann thought, if she approved of and agreed with my selections and most of all, if it pleased her—or if she thought it was a Bubbie Cookie. The fact that it’s here on Tragic Magic and at Largehearted Boy for you to listen to suggests the answer to all of those questions.
4.
It’s typical for novelists presenting Largehearted Boy’s “Book Notes” playlists to say something about each track and its meaning to them, to their novel, to their work as a whole; or to explain how certain songs actually played a role in their process of writing, or inspired some episode in the book. I can’t possibly do any of those things since, to my great regret, I didn’t write Some Bright Nowhere. This is a reader’s playlist, and represents only a faithful record, made in the book’s immediate aftermath, in the lingering shimmer of its comet tail3, of everything that reading it had made me feel. The songs that gathered around this book in my mind, found in this playlist, tend to be ones whose narrator/singer shares some perception, emotion, or predicament with Claire, Eliot, or with the novel itself. In the notes that follow, I’ve limited myself simply to pointing out the connection—where I can do it without spoilers—and a key lyric or two by way of example.
1. “Death With Dignity” – Sufjan Stevens, Carrie and Lowell
Carrie and Lowell represents the intensely literary, multi-instrumentalist Stevens’s attempt to come to terms with the death of a damaged mother who had abandoned him and his siblings when they were very young. Apparently he now believes that the attempt was a failure, which is sad, but you and I know better. This song works because, like the novel, it starts in medias res, or really almost in ultimas res, and because Claire is not just a wife leaving her husband behind; she’s a mother of two, and the forlorn and confused efforts of her adult children, trying bravely to act as though they have some idea what it’s going to mean to lose their family’s center of gravity, provide some of the novel’s most poignant moments.
Key lyric: Especially for a lead-off track: I don’t know where to begin and And we all know how this will end
2. “High and Dry” – Radiohead, The Bends
I’ll be honest, I don’t really know what “High and Dry” is about, though I’ve listened and attended to the lyrics with care many, many times. I’ve read Thom Yorke’s reported remarks on the subject; they are not illuminating. There’s a boy doing reckless motorcycle jumps. There are some unspecified haters, who also spit. But oh, musically, does this one ever have the ache! And of course its lyrical refrain, echoed in the title, precisely formulates the heartbroken plea that Eliot works so hard throughout the novel to repress. And then there is this lyric, stating (for our purposes) one of the novel’s hardest truths about the blow to its equilibrium a marriage can suffer when cancer (or some other illness) undoes one of the two desired bodies.
All your insides fall to pieces You just sit there wishing you could still make love
Key lyric: Don’t leave me high and dry
3. “Naked As We Came” – Iron & Wine, Our Endless Numbered Days
This is one of a few songs on this playlist that tries to do what Claire (along with the author) resolves to do in Some Bright Nowhere: to took levelly and unblinkingly at her death (the death of both partners, ultimately, in singer-songwriter Sam Beam’s curiously sweet bittersweet vision), and at the marriage that will pass away with her.
Key lyric: Wake up, it’s no use pretending
4. “Something On Your Mind” – Karen Dalton, In My Own Time
It’s so hard, so painful, so powerful, in the early part of the novel, as Claire moves in secret toward the death she envisions and wants for herself; keeping it from Eliot, wanting but afraid to tell him what she has decided. Of course he senses that she’s holding something back, and as the evidence mounts, that sense becomes a certainty; and here we have the weary, wary soulfulness of Karen Dalton singing “Something On Your Mind.”
Key lyric: Straight out of the baffled, desperately optimistic mind of poor Eliot: Maybe another day/You’ll want to feel another way
5. “The Greatest” – Cat Power, The Greatest
This is a fairly elliptical Chan Marshall lyric (and a fantastic vocal), open to many interpretations, but to me the song’s “I” is looking back (the way Claire does) at the strength and vigor and capacities of the body that has betrayed her, with a kind of bleak wonder (Once I wanted to be the greatest/No wind or waterfall could stall me/And then came the rush of the flood/Stars at night turned deep to dust), and trying to ready herself and those around her for its impending failure, and the final tasks that failure will entail.
Key lyric: Lower me down/Pin me in/Secure the grounds/For the lead/And the dregs of my bed/I’ve been sleeping/For the later parade
6. “Good Friends” – Maren Morris, Humble Quest
As I mentioned to Ann in trying to reassure her that a playlist faithfully inspired by her book could never be “a collection of dirges,” one of Some Bright Nowhere’s central motifs is the sustaining power, and the fundamental needfulness to women, of their friendships with other women, even as time alters and redefines them. Yet while there are plenty of girlfriends-on-the-town-having-fun pop anthems, I had a hard time finding songs on the subject of enduring female friendships and the ways they change over time, outside the work of Joni Mitchell, who has several—“Song for Sharon,” “Chinese Cafe,” even maybe “Ladies of the Canyon.” But those all felt so specific to Mitchell, somehow, in their context and in their particulars. Then I stumbled on this swell track by sometime-Highwoman Maren Morris, a favorite of my younger daughter’s, co-written with Greg Kurstin and Natalie Hemby. Of course I’m no expert, but it seemed to really capture something true.
Key lyric: Too much love, too much dirt, too much time/Wouldn’t change, couldn’t leave if we tried
“Meet On The Ledge” – Richard Thompson, Acoustic Classics II
A classic of retrospective rue, taking stock of failed promise, unfinished business, and unfulfilled dreams as one approaches the inevitable “ledge,” wondering what if anything comes next. Written by Thompson, and originally recorded with Fairport Convention, this is a powerful solo acoustic version, a sterling performance by one of the greatest guitar-and-voice men ever.
Key lyric: Kind of the whole thing, actually.
”Temptation” – New Order, Substance
The only overt reference to music in the novel is to the “1980s New Wave” playing in an LA bar that Eliot and a friend visit, which reminds them of their college days. I seized on this slight clue and reached for New Order, so many of whose songs grapple—with a spare, unsparing beauty one might call Packeresque—with mortality, life’s purpose, the fragility and strength of love.
Key lyric: Up, down, turn around/Please don’t let me hit the ground/Tonight, I think I’ll walk alone/I’ll find my soul as I go home
“Here Comes The Summer” – Fiery Furnaces, The Fiery Furnaces (EP)
See, Ann? Not all dirges! Not all of Eliot’s and Claire’s end-of-life/end-of-marriage retrospections are wistful and melancholy—far from it. Both of them take strength, at different points in the novel, from recalling their early days, the first flush of love and desire. The wonderful songs of sibling-act Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger, d.b.a. Fiery Furnaces, are notoriously elliptical and imagistic, but to me this track is about reaching for, insisting on—Remember?—the nourishment and even renewal of an old, passionate love that fond retrospection can bring.
Key lyric: And now it finally seems about to start/I swear, I swear that I will do my part
“Your Arms Around Me” – Jens Lekman, The Linden Trees Are Still In Blossom
There’s a trip to the Emergency Room in Some Bright Nowhere, necessitated (in part) by the inadvertent, unintentional thoughtlessness (at worst) of one of the partners, a scene that put me in mind of this entrancing piece of deadpan “chamber music verité” by the Swedish guitar-pop maestro. Sometimes we hurt the ones we love totally by accident—even when we’re just trying to give them a hug!
Key lyric (it gives me a shiver every time): What’s broken can always be fixed/What’s fixed will always be broken
“I Will Follow You Into The Dark” – Death Cab for Cutie, Plans
I mean, obviously, right?
Key lyric: Love of mine/Someday you will die
“Night Still Comes” – Neko Case, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You
The hardest hard thing for Eliot is that, fundamentally, he doesn’t—can’t—understand Claire’s decision. As much as he loves her, as long as he’s known her, as hard as he tries to understand, her dying wish makes no sense to him. And from his POV—the POV of the novel—his incomprehension is ultimately on her: she’s responsible for it. One of Ann’s most amazing narrative feats is to lead the reader, little by little, through the intervening screen of Eliot’s obtuseness, to a moving, pitying grasp of why, facing death, she wants what she wants. And it’s not—not really—on her, at all. I don’t know if all that is in this terrific Neko Case song or not—but I kind of think it is.
Key lyric: There’s nothing you can say to me/You never held it at the right angle
“River” – Joni Mitchell, Blue
There is a sad and forlorn Christmas in this book, a family Christmas where everything feels broken and wrong, and that’s part of what this song is doing on this playlist. But it’s also here because it’s one of the best songs I know about the powerful and mournful yearning, like Claire’s, for an escape, a release from all the brokenness and wrongness, that feels like it will never come.
Key lyric: I wish I had a river so long/I would teach my feet to fly
“Babylon” – David Gray, White Ladder
It’s not just death that’s about letting go, the novel says; love is about letting go, too—of outdated expectations, impossible hopes, unrealized plans, doubts, fears, and all the daily scurf of life and its disappointments that get in the way of our being present, fully present, at last, for the one we love. That’s what this superb David Gray track, one of my personal all-timers, is all about, too.
Key lyric: If you want it, come and get it/Crying out loud/The love that I was giving you/Was never in doubt/Let go of your heart/Let go of your head/And feel it now
“Flirted With You All My Life” – Cowboy Junkies, Demons
A candidate for the best pop song ever about death, certainly the greatest ever directly addressed to Death itself (might be a short list), this is a remarkable rock-and-roll cover of the late Vic Chesnutt’s dark-country-folk classic. Claire’s powerful longing for release from the pain and indignity of her illness, hinted at in Mitchell’s “River,” is here made explicit, is named. The singer may not yet be ready, but Claire is.
Key lyric: Oh, death you hector me/Decimate those dear to me/Tease me with your sweet relief
“Take Care” – Big Star, Third
We’re approaching the goodbye phase of the book and of the playlist now, and this—in its stripped-down, string-sectionless version—is one of the most haunting and ineffably final goodbye songs I can think of. In the end—the real end—what else is there to say to those we leave behind besides Take care?
Key lyric: This sounds a bit like goodbye/In a way it is, I guess/As I leave your side/I’ve taken the air
“This Is The Day” – The The, Soul Mining
I’m not sure it’s in the lyrics, and would bet that a lot of people don’t hear it this way at all, but to me the central, titular assertion in this bravely poppy, self-betrayingly melancholy song—another “1980s New Wave” classic—is not meant to be taken at face value.
This is the day Your life will surely change This is the day When things fall into place
In my mind, the poor shlep singing these words is doing so as he walks down the sidewalk under a piano that is silently falling from an upper story. I think it’s that somehow-pathetic “surely”— but that’s probably just me. What makes this song by Matt Johnson (the man behind The The) so great, so memorable, and so appropriate here is the way it creates a powerful sense of imminence. For good or for ill, we feel, this actually is The Day. And as we move with Claire beyond goodbyes, toward the last track of this Some Bright Nowhere playlist, I wanted to try to suggest the terrible, terribly moving imminence that Ann builds so expertly in the book’s final passages.
Key lyric: This is the day
“Heaven” – Talking Heads, Fear of Music
As soon as I read the lines from the Christian Wiman poem that a friend in the novel shares with Eliot: some bright nowhere/of bright fields and sunlight/that was my idea of heaven—long before I knew I was going to be making a playlist for the eponymous novel—I thought of this classic Talking Heads number, which presents a similar conception of Heaven as a place of beautiful vacuity. The possibility of some kind of afterlife glints briefly here and there in the novel like a bit of silvery thread, and this track with its deadpan, lovely, sweetly ironic David Byrne vision of some bright nowhere feels like the perfect, obvious, and most fitting choice to finish off this musical, mixtape interpretation of Claire’s life and death, and Ann Packer’s novel.
Key lyric: Heaven, heaven is a place/A place where nothing/Nothing ever happens
1 Though I will note, without rancor or bitterness, that Mr. Boy has yet to request a tin of my own Bubbie Cookies.
2 The first Monday in March, a state holiday in Illinois.
3 Yes, Dr. Kohoutek, comets’ tails can also precede them, thank you.