In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Jason Diamond’s debut Kaplan’s Plot, one of the year’s most engaging and entertaining novels, is an epic, multi-generational saga.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“A rich tapestry of a Chicago Jewish family [. . .] Diamond crafts an affecting portrait of the bond mother and son gradually form over revelations about the past [. . .] A memorable tale of the American dream gone sideways.”
In his own words, here is Jason Diamond’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Kaplan’s Plot:
I think there’s a big difference between novels that are influenced by cinema, and novels that are written with the purpose of being adapted into films. For my debut novel, Kaplan’s Plot, my love of movies, and my interest in how directors make them, played a big part in my process. I have plenty of writer heroes, but I don’t know if any one influences my style. I could mention how influenced I am by Franz Kafka, Daphne du Maurier, Grace Paley, Jesmyn Ward, or Jonathan Franzen, but I don’t know how much it comes out in the writing. On the other hand, when I say the Coens are a massive influence on my writing, then I think anybody who reads my book could easily see where that comes through. I like to think I’m directing a story, just on paper and I sadly don’t have a multi-million dollar budget. Nor do I have a soundtrack playing throughout the experience, but since I’m a big fan of trying to make as immersive an experience as possible, I did have a playlist I worked with that served as sort of a score when I needed to get away from the actual writing and try to envision the story playing out in my head.
Colin Stetson – “Those Who Didn’t Run”
My book is a braided narrative that shows multiple generations of a family. The early-20th century part focuses on the brothers Yitz and Sol escaping Odesa to Chicago, and the different paths they go down, and the other shows Yitz’s daughter and son, Eve and Elijah, after Elijah has returned home to Chicago. His life has basically fallen apart and his mother is dying, and in the middle of all of this, he’s presented with a big family mystery that he decides he wants to solve. Originally, the book started with this scene from the brothers’ early days in Chicago, because I liked the way it felt as an opening to sort of give a sense of how they’d essentially gone from one dangerous place in Eastern Europe to another in America, but it eventually felt off as an opening. It’s in the book, and it’s a pretty brutal scene that takes place in the woods and has them running for their lives. I had this song by Colin Stetson playing as I came up with it.
Tom Waits – “Chicago”
Tom Waits isn’t a Chicago guy, but there’s something about this song that reminds me of the entire book in a montage. I use a lot of photos and movies as inspiration when I’m building the story, and the early parts of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven really stuck with me, and I feel like this song captures a similar energy of turn of the century Chicago as early-1900s Chicago as this big, brooding, dangerous city.
Now Ensemble – “City Boy”
I write a lot to the album this one is on, but this track in particular is 11-minutes, and I could space out and get into the head of Elijah as he’s just trying to get used to being back in his hometown of Chicago, walking around and taking it all in.
Kitsos Harisiadis – “Skaros”
Kaplan’s Plot is about immigrants. My main characters are all Jewish people, and many of them come from Eastern Europe, but the part of Chicago we see in the earlier parts of the book are situated around Maxwell Street, which was mostly Jewish immigrants, but it was close to the neighborhoods where Black, Italian, Polish, and Greek people lived, so I tried listening to more music that those people would have brought to Chicago with them, and imagined this Greek song playing out of a window a few blocks down from the part where my characters live.
The Effigies – “Haunted Town”
Chicago’s old-school punk and hardcore stuff tends to fly under the radar in my opinion, and even though none of the book takes place in the 1980s, I sort of kept hearing this song when I’d close my eyes and see my characters walking around by themselves regardless of the time I put them in.
Warsaw Village Band – “A Red Apple”
Maxwell Street had Jewish people from all over Eastern Europe. And while the characters in my book come from Ukraine, the population that originated in Poland was probably the biggest, and I could see a song like this playing in some small place in the neighborhood. It’s also moody enough that it felt like it could set the tone for a bunch of parts in the book.
Andrew Bird – “Dance of Death”
Andrew is from the same neck of the Chicago suburbs that I went to high school in, and I’ve been a fan for a really long time. I wish I could have hired him to do the instrumental score for the book, I’d ask him to try and use this track as his direction.
Frankie Knuckles – “Your Love”
I love Chicago house, so I had to make a mention of it at some point in the book, and it comes when Elijah is sitting in a bar in a gentrified part of town, and the place is decorated in a very 1980s dystopian sci-fi meets cocaine sort of way, so I thought something byFrankie Knuckles would be playing through the speakers.
DeLeon – “Ya Ribon Alam”
A big part of this book to me was making sure that while Yitz and Sol are from Ukraine, making them Ashkenazi Jews, I also wanted to have Sephardic characters because I don’t see enough of them in American fiction. Elijah is half-Ashkenazi and half-Sephardic since his father’s father came over from North Africa and his paternal grandmother was from Puerto Rico, her own parents had converted back to Judaism years after their ancestors had been forced to convert to Catholicism—I actually knew somebody whose family had the same story. While my entire family is Jewish, I have Sephardic roots, and my brother and sister who have a different mother than I do are Jewish and Hispanic. I wanted to show how we can all find connection with each other. I also pictured Elijah’s paternal grandparents speaking some Ladino, so I listened to this album by Deleon a lot to try and at least hear their accents in my head.
Chava Alberstein & The Klezmatics – “The Golden Peacock”
One of the things that links the family members through the generations in my book is a lack of communication. They don’t talk to each other and never bring up the past because there’s so much pain they’re all feeling. I definitely called on some of my own family experiences for that, but one of the rare things I can think back to that always made me happy was when I’d hear one of my grandparents humming or quietly singing a song that I couldn’t understand but was definitely something that they’d brought with them from Eastern Europe. I’ve always loved this particular Yiddish folk song and liked to imagine the two mothers in the book humming it from time to time.
Magic Sam – “My Love Will Never Die”
The part of the book that takes place in the 20th century stretches over 50 years from the early-1900s until the early-1960s, and things are still situated largely around Maxwell Street, but by that time the neighborhood had gone from being almost entirely Jewish to mostly Black folks, many of whom had come up from the South with the Great Migration. As a thousand history books will tell you, the blues was born in the South, but it came up in Chicago when guys like Muddy Waters or Howlin Wolf plugged their guitars in. I found myself thinking that Yitz (the gangster grandfather who was in his 60s by that point) liked the music he was hearing, and this song in particular spoke to him and made him think of his wife, Rose.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Jason Diamond’s playlist for his book Searching for John Hughes
Jason Diamond is the author of Searching for John Hughes, The Sprawl and co-author of New York Nico’s Guide to NYC (with Nicolas Heller). His work has been published by the New York Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, GQ, The Paris Review, and many other outlets. He publishes the newsletter The Melt, was born in Skokie, Illinois, and currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter. Kaplan’s Plot is his first novel.