In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Brian Platzer’s The Optimists is an intensely moving novel filled with unforgettable, magnificently drawn characters.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Brilliant… What will stick with readers most are the multi-dimensional portraits of complicated, flawed human beings, most notably the novel’s narrator. Keening, darkly funny, and gruffly tender.”
In her own words, here is Brian Platzer’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Optimists:
“Night Game” – Paul Simon
Still Crazy After All These Years won the Grammy for Album of the Year, but I’ve never heard anyone discuss “Night Game” in any context. It’s a bizarre song. Almost a nursery rhyme that sits on the album between divorce songs and meditations on aging. It’s a baseball song that refuses nostalgia.
“There were two men down / And the score was tied / In the bottom of the eighth / When the pitcher died.”
I think the song is a joke. There are two men down, and then the pitcher dies, which makes there be three men down. So the inning is over. It’s the type of kind of half-funny, ridiculous, sad joke that the narrator of my novel, The Optimists, would love to have thought of. And that the listener of Simon’s song, as well as the reader of my novel, isn’t quite sure if the teller of the joke thinks the joke is brilliant or terrible.
Here’s Simon’s follow up to his punchline: “There were three men down / And the season lost / And the tarpaulin was rolled / Upon the winter frost.”
As far as I can tell, Simon has never explained the song. He just wrote it and left it there.
Rod Keating was a real man. My eighth grade English teacher. He is also the fictional narrator of my novel, The Optimists. In the novel, Mr. Keating is a devoted baseball fan. He spent thirty years teaching eighth-grade English at St. George’s Episcopal School in Manhattan. He believed in rigor, repetition, standards: the slow cumulative effect of daily attention to craft. He designed a 200-question test called the Ember Exam and treated it with the seriousness of a pennant race.
Then, in both real life and fiction, he had a massive stroke. A week after officiating my wedding, his body locked him inside itself. He spent the final decade of his life unable to speak, read, or move freely.
The pitcher died mid-game. The equipment stayed on the field.
The fictional Rod wrote The Optimists by blinking at a computer screen, using eye-tracking software to translate eye movements into text—one word at a time, over years. The novel is what you write when the tarp has been rolled over everything and you’re still, somehow, conscious beneath it.
“Ms. Fat Booty” – Mos Def
“Ms. Fat Booty” is Black on Both Sides’s best and most unsettling track. The music is catchy while the narrative is calm. The speaker—some version of Mos Def—sees a woman on the street, becomes obsessed, gets her number through a mutual friend, and imagines a future. The lyrics are straightforward and specific. “Neck and wrist laced up, very little make-up.” He tracks her down, calls her, plans dates in his head.
Then she ghosts him. Months later, he sees her with another man and realizes the relationship existed largely in his imagination.
What makes the song brilliant and unusual is Mos Def’s willingness to document his own delusion. He doesn’t pretend he was wronged. He doesn’t revise the fantasy after the fact. He admits he built a world out of fragments and mistook proximity for intimacy.
Teachers do this constantly, though we rarely say it out loud. I’ve taught eighth grade English myself for 17 years, and I recognize this impulse uncomfortably well. In my novel, Rod meets Clara Hightower when she is thirteen, a student in his eighth-grade English class for one academic year. Then she graduates. He does not see her again for twenty years.
During those twenty years, he tracks her through alumni gossip and Google searches, reconstructs her life from public information and private speculation: elite high school, Silicon Valley stardom, radical activism, federal investigation. Teaching provides a language that makes this obsession feel respectable. We call it “following former students,” “caring about outcomes,” “taking pride in their success.”
Mos Def has the intellectual honesty to call it fantasy. To view my novel in the most cynical light, Rod writes a novel because he needs Clara’s success to validate his thirty years in the classroom—because he has quietly built his sense of professional worth around a thirteen-year-old he barely knew. That may sound harsh. It may also be true. Or true in a way that’s inseparable from love.
The worst lyric in “Ms. Fat Booty” is “Man, I smashed it like an Idaho potato.” It occupies the same uneasy space as the “three men down” joke, where it’s unclear whether Mos Def is trying to be clever or quietly mocking himself.
“All Things Bright and Beautiful” – Traditional Hymn
“All things bright and beautiful / All creatures great and small / All things wise and wonderful / The Lord God made them all.” It’s sung at schools like St. George’s Episcopal during assemblies. Parents love it because it sounds wholesome and affirming.
What the hymn actually insists upon is that God made kids. Which is to say: the school did not.
This is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of elite education. Private schools are selection mechanisms, not creation mechanisms. Clara Hightower arrives at St. George’s already extraordinary—intellectually sharp, socially odd, capable of insights that surprise adults. Rod didn’t make her that way. His task was to avoid damaging what was already there, which is harder than it sounds but far less impressive than creation.
The hymn insists that God made all the wise and wonderful things, and leaves unanswered who made the insipid and terrible ones.
Most teaching is triage. You try not to crush the strange ones with standardization, not to bore the brilliant ones with busy work, not to overlook the quiet ones who don’t demand attention. If you succeed, they leave and do interesting things. If you fail, they often leave and do interesting things anyway. The outcomes look remarkably similar.
Rod spends an entire novel trying to prove that he created Clara’s success. Maybe he did. He absolutely helped. He’s a brilliant, loving, fantastic teacher. I believe he mattered in a way that statistics can’t register. The hymn does not resolve this question. It simply reminds us that the line between influence and authorship is thinner, and more fragile, than we like to admit.
“Somebody That I Used to Know” – Gotye (feat. Kimbra)
For two-thirds of the song, Gotye narrates the breakup from a familiar position of grievance. Then Kimbra enters with her verse and the song tilts. Same relationship, opposite interpretation.
Who’s right? Probably both. And the song gets so much energy out of Kimbra coming in to interrupt Gotye, the listener not knowing if one side is right or if they both are.
Rod narrates The Optimists in fragments that jump across three decades of Clara’s life. He explains what she was thinking at thirteen, at twenty-five, at thirty. He describes their relationship, what it meant to her, how his teaching shaped her trajectory.
But we only hear his version. Clara never speaks except through Rod’s reconstruction of conversations decades past. Every teacher’s story about a former student is unreliable by design, because the student is not there to interrupt. There is no Kimbra verse.
Which makes me wonder if, in “Somebody that I Used to Know,” the Kimbra verse is actually from Kimbra’s perspective or if, like Mr. Keating writing about Clara, Kimbra’s verse is just Gotye writing about what he imagines Kimbra would say. Both women have voices, but it’s ambiguous whether they, themselves are their voices’ authors.
Rod writes three hundred pages about Clara. What would Clara write about Rod? Would she remember him at all? I don’t know. The novel doesn’t either. That uncertainty is not a flaw. It’s the subject.
“Graceland” – Paul Simon
Paul Simon was accused of violating the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa. His defense, that music transcends politics, is the sort of thing artists say when they just want permission to proceed. The album remains the best of American pop music.
The title track is about driving to Memphis with his young son after the collapse of a marriage. Graceland—Elvis’s mansion, where he died overweight, paranoid, and locked inside himself—is now a museum of failure converted into pilgrimage. Why go there? Simon never explains.
Rod’s pilgrimage is backward through time rather than across geography. Immobilized by stroke, he travels through memory and speculation, reconstructing Clara’s life from fragments. He is chasing reflected glory because his own life feels unfinished.
I think that Simon understands something Rod may not: Graceland is pathetic. You don’t go there to find meaning. You go because you’re broken and don’t know what else to do. The song ends where it begins: “I’m going to Graceland.” Not arrival. Just motion. Rod’s novel resolves for the reader, even if it doesn’t for Rod.
Also, this is the best quatrain in pop music:
She comes back to tell me she’s gone
As if I didn’t know that
As if I didn’t know my own bed
As if I’d never noticed the way she brushed her hair from her forehead.
“Visions of Johanna” – Bob Dylan
“Visions of Johanna” is the clearest artistic account of how desire distorts perception. Louise is present. Johanna is absent. Yet Johanna dominates. The song is not narrative so much as accumulation: images piling up without resolution, because, once again, obsession doesn’t resolve.
Rod knew Clara for a handful of months when she was thirteen. For the next twenty years, she exists primarily as a vision, a justification, a way of not thinking about himself. He admits late in the novel that he is writing Clara’s story “because I don’t know how I’d explain my own.”
Dylan has the honesty to call them visions. Rod calls his a novel.
For reasons that made sense at the time, when I was 16 I went to the Czech Republic to help rebuild castles that didn’t actually benefit by my attempts to rebuild them. It was a way to make Americans think better of the Czech Republic, I think? I had a girlfriend on the trip. She was from France, which I thought was impressive. Her kiss tasted of flower water, is a thought I had at the time. I don’t remember why I didn’t try to go further than making out with her, but it was probably due to fear that I wasn’t the kind of guy a French girl would want to go further than making out with. When I hear these lyrics:
Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
I think about my girlfriend in the Czech Republic and how we dramatically kissed farewell at the airport and how she told me she hated Bob Dylan’s voice.
“Glory Bound” – Martin Sexton
“Glory Bound” is the kind of song artists return to when everything else has failed. It argues that making art redeems a life. That the act itself counts, even if nothing comes of it. Rod’s body has abandoned him. All that remains is writing, slow and exhausting and uncertain. He doesn’t know if the book is good. Just that stopping would mean loss.
I’m taking a chance on the wind
I’m packing all my bags
Taking a mistake I gotta make
Then I’m glory bound
Whether glory exists is beside the point. The writing is what remains.
There’s a line that bothers me in this otherwise beautiful song:
Freedom came my way that night
Just like a jet plane in and out of sight
I was hauling ass at a million miles an hour
Wondering how hard I’d hit
“Hauling ass at a million miles an hour” is terrible writing. It’s almost enough to ruin what’s otherwise one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard.
“Loves Me Like a Rock” – Paul Simon
This is a song about unconditional love. Love detached from merit. Solid. Immovable. What some Christians call “Grace.” A love that exists because of the lover’s capacity, not the beloved’s worth.
Rod wants this kind of validation from Clara, from his wife Caroline, and from his reader.
It’s a fun, funny song. In many ways it’s full of jokes, just like The Optimists.
And if I was President (Was the President)
The minute congress call my name (Was the President)
I’d say now, who do (who)
Who do you think you’re foolin’ (Who do you think you’re foolin’)
I’ve got the Presidential seal (Was the President)
I’m up on the Presidential podium
My mama loves me, she loves me
But it’s dead-serious about love.
“Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” – Paul Simon
Paul Simon was on Colbert a year or so ago. I didn’t stay up to watch. I don’t think anyone stays up to watch these shows anymore. Colbert asked Simon to list his five favorite songs to play. Paul Simon is 82 years old and deaf in one ear, so instead of listing five he listed four “fast ones” and three “ballads.” The “fast ones” were Graceland, Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard, Late in the Evening, and Mother and Child Reunion. The “ballads” were Sound of Silence, The Boxer, and Still Crazy After All These Years. Paul Simon wrote Sound of Silence when he was 22 years old, and he wrote Graceland when he was 44. Then he kept on putting out music for another 38 years, during which time he wrote none of his favorite seven songs. I’m 44 years old now, myself.
My wife Alex and I were married on June 26, 2010. We asked the real Rod Keating to officiate. We walked out of the ceremony to “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” a song about an unspecified transgression at a school that Paul Simon never explains.
That refusal is the song’s wisdom. Some exchanges can’t be narrated without distortion. Rod writes The Optimists trying to prove that something measurable occurred in that eighth-grade classroom. Simon leaves it unsaid. Mr. Keating explains. He tries to prove Clara’s value, and through her, his own.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Brian Platzer’s playlist for his novel Bed-Stuy Is Burning
Brian Platzer was the education columnist for The Atlantic and has written frequently for the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and many other publications. He currently teaches and lives with his family in Brooklyn and Paris.