In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Clifford Thompson’s novel Let Us Go Then, You and I is a remarkable fiction debut.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“A midlife-crisis novel that searches for the meaning of life with sympathy and compassion.”
In his own words, here is Clifford Thompson’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Let Us Go Then, You and I:
The novel begins in 2002 with Theo Brown, who has lived in his grandfather’s house in Washington, DC, for all of his 37 years, lamenting the recent death of Charles Maddox, his best friend since fourth grade and a successful journalist in New York City. Charles died of a drug overdose, but there are questions about why. The song here is “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” performed by G.C. Cameron for the 1975 film Cooley High; Theo and Charles would likely have seen this film, which was a hit in black communities like theirs. In the film, the song plays during one character’s burial, watched from afar by the character’s grieving and guilt-ridden best friend. “It’s So Hard” captures Theo’s heartbreak.
And yet heartbreak is not all Theo feels. At Charles’s funeral, listening to the reminiscences by friends of Charles’s whom he has never met or even heard of, Theo begins to wonder if he knew his best friend as well as he thought—or if Theo really had much of a place in Charles’s life. A version of Solitude, recorded by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington at their historic 1961 summit, evokes much of Theo’s emotion: Armstrong’s gravelly, mournful vocals and heart-piercing, introspective trumpet lines suggest Theo’s mood, full of feeling yet alone.
Soon the novel looks back at when Theo and Charles met as boys. Washington, DC, was the scene of a musical subgenre of funk called Go-Go. A leading light in Go-Go was the DC-based group Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, whose song I Feel Like Bustin Loose was all over the city airwaves during Theo and Charles’s growing-up years in the 1970s—and also captured Charles’s feeling of wanting to spread his wings and do all in life that he is capable of.
While the more retiring Theo stays in DC, Charles moves to New York after college. Peter Gabriel’s Big Time is the perfect soundtrack for this time in Charles’s life, as he confidently—though not always as confidently as he seems—takes on the big city.
Theo, meanwhile, continues to live with the grandfather who raised him beginning when Theo was abandoned by his mother as an infant—a rejection that left a hidden but permanent hole in his confidence. Remaining with Granddad as a young adult, partly out of inertia, partly from lack of confidence, Theo eventually feels unable to leave home—even when he is finally ready to—because of the old man’s growing dependence on him. Cat Stevens’s song Father and Son reflects the mix of love and frustration in the relationship between Theo and his grandfather.
When Theo’s grandfather dies, not long after Charles’s death, Theo is at a crossroads. Suddenly untethered, wondering about the reasons behind his best friend’s death, wanting to help Charles’s grieving sister, Melanie, find some answers, and grieving himself, Theo makes a—for him—radical choice: he moves for a time to New York, to meet those in Charles’s circle and try to figure out what happened. In other words, Theo becomes a detective, just like Johnson Jones, the hero of the crime novels he loves. The Ventures’ recording of Hawaii Five-O—the theme of the detective TV show of the same name, which aired during Theo’s boyhood—captures the excitement and drama of Theo’s adventure.
Theo first met Charles’s sister when he and Charles were young boys. A beautiful girl who ran with the “in” crowd, two years older than Charles, Melanie seemed to Theo to be his romantic ideal—and to be so far beyond his reach that he never considered actually pursuing her. But when Theo and Melanie are grown and reestablish contact after Charles’s death, Theo begins to sense that he has a chance with her. He wants her, and he thinks that she wants him. But, realizing that he has not lived much of a life until now, he feels reluctant to enter a committed relationship before he has lived a bit on his own. Will the potential love between them wait until after Theo’s adventure in New York? Lionel Richie’s Hello expresses both the desire Theo feels for Melanie and the distance between them. (Is it me you’re looking for?)
In New York Theo begins to put the pieces together and meets the beautiful Holly—the woman at the center of Charles’s life and the person who seems to hold the key to understanding his death. The more Theo comes to know Holly, the more he begins to understand what happened to his friend. Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible gives a feel for Holly’s power over Charles and other men—including Theo?
As Theo learns more about Charles’s love life, and looks back on his own, we hear OutKast’s Hey Ya!—a seemingly upbeat song that embodies both the excitement of romantic relationships and the melancholy when they don’t work out.
Indeed, because the novel is part detective story and part doomed romance, George Benson’s This Masquerade—whose bluesy melancholy is the perfect accompaniment to a noir tale—is the right soundtrack for Theo’s investigation. Meanwhile . . .
. . . threaded through Theo’s story is the story of his mother, Robin. Her abandonment of Theo is part of the pattern of her life. Robin lives by her own lights. She will not be held still when she wants to move, and she always wants to move, never quite sure of what she’s looking for, knowing only when she hasn’t found it. Fleetwood Mac’s Rhiannon nails Robin’s free spirit and perpetual dissatisfaction.
At the end of the story, Theo has discovered some truths, which do not come without a cost. He has arrived at a sense of a new beginning, one that helps him accept, but does not let him forget, old wounds. The saxman Julian “Cannonball” Adderley’s achingly beautiful 1957 instrumental version of Spring Is Here, by Richard Rodgers and Lorez Hart, is the ideal coda for this story of friendship, love, and the joy and pain of both.
Clifford Thompson’s previous books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’ s Blues and Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays. His work has appeared in Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction. Thompson lives in Brooklyn.