In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Kyle McCarthy’s Immersions is one of the year’s most intense novels.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“A tender yet tense story of estranged sisters who grew up studying ballet . . . McCarthy writes astutely about dance as a double-edged sword that impassions the sisters but also damages them. The result is magnetic.”
In her own words, here is Kyle McCarthy’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Immersions:
As soon as I started writing Immersions I knew the bad boy of the novel would be named Johnny. All bad boys are named Johnny: all drifters, no-good charmers, and sweet, shiftless men.
Here, I imagine a scene not included in the novel: Johnny driving home from the city, thinking about one woman and then the next.
Boa Sorte (Good Luck) – Vanessa de Mata with Ben Harper
Johnny taps the steering wheel. He can sing the English, but not the Portuguese. This is a sexy song about separation, an irony he appreciates. He imagines the modern dancer from the city in the passenger seat. “This was a massive hit in Brazil,” he might tell her. “Really made Vanessa’s career.”
Upside Down – Diana Ross
But indulging in this daydream makes him feel foolish. And there is another dancer waiting for him at home. He’s enough of a feminist to feel bad about the two-woman situation, but not too bad. That’s why he turns on ‘Upside Down’ by Diana Ross. Sure, the song’s about cheating, but the beat is so bouncy that it’s easy to think the woman doesn’t mind that much. And isn’t it pleasant to imagine the dancer—either the one in the city or the one at home—singing this song to him?
Dance of the Seven Veils – Liz Phair
Stuck on the George Washington bridge, stuck in Ross’s loop, Johnny’s narcissism slowly curdles to self-loathing. That’s when he turns on Liz Phair. Singing along, he decides he’s John the Baptist. Phair’s Salome, the sexy dancer (he likes sexy dancers) who demands his head on a platter. Johnny my love / you’re already dead Phair intones, and this Johnny, alone in his Subaru, shivers.
But Johnny’s more than a middle-aged clown wallowing in self-disgust. There’s something complicated going on with his relationships with women, and in this haunting, ornate retelling of the fairy tale ‘Bluebeard,’ he hears the questions about secrets and space, the desire for privacy and locked doors, that he keeps asking himself. Why does his romantic past feel like so many bodies piled up in a room?
Swan Lake, Op. 20, Act Two: No. 10, Moderato – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Thinking about ex-girlfriends reminds him of Frances, the sister of his ex-wife. A month back he took her to a downtown restaging of this classic story ballet. Even the antics of the avant garde couldn’t undermine the beauty of Tchaikovsky’s score, the haunting famous melody he used to know how to play on the piano. He’s a man of culture, so he turns it on now.
Frances can play it, too. Her older sister taught her.
Fidelity – Regina Spektor
Charley. Charley the older sister. Now Johnny is cooking up I-95, and all the old ghosts are coming out. He’s thinking about his ex-wife Charley, and that time in the mid-aughts when they were so happy together. Sunday mornings she used to crank this song and bop around the kitchen, wagging her head to the chug of the chorus. Hitting eighty in the left lane, he sings Oh I never loved nobody fully / always kept one foot on the floor.
Like a car stuttering to a stop, like Spektor’s voice caught on that one word, heart—that’s how Johnny’s marriage ended.
Lonely Boy – Black Keys
All this nostalgia makes him squirmy. When he sees the sign for his exit, he pulls up this classic. Oh yes, Johnny is a lonely boy all right. Charley is now a nun. She locked herself away. She keeps him waiting.
Prince Johnny – St. Vincent
Almost there. Time for one last female rocker singing about our hero’s charms and faults. Johnny sings out his own name, pretending that St. Vincent knows him, they’ve done coke together in bathroom stalls, and she’s worried about him, she really is. She calls him kind, but not simple. She’s hoping that someday he’ll become a real boy.
Home, Johnny cuts the engine. He sits awhile in the car, listening to the cooling motor tick. Through the window he sees Frances. Make me a real boy, he whispers. I wanna mean more than I mean to you.
Kyle McCarthy is the author of the novel Everyone Knows How Much I Love You, and her fiction and essays have appeared in Best American Short Stories, American Short Fiction, n+1, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.