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May 2, 2019
Rachel Cline's Playlist for Her Novel "The Question Authority"
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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.
Rachel Cline's The Question Authority is a compelling, haunting, and important novel.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"Nora is a beautifully crafted character. Late in the book, she comments on her own 'prickliness,' and the word is perfect. Nora is sharp and hard to get close to, and now, in her 50s, she's trying to understand how much of that is a reaction to Mr. Rasmussen—his behavior toward Nora but also what she knows about him and Beth and a handful of other girls."
In her own words, here is Rachel Cline's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Question Authority:
This novel is about one cranky grown woman’s struggle to understand who’s to blame for her best friend’s affair with their 8th grade teacher, and its aftermath, forty years later. Was the teacher the only bad guy? What about his wife? Where were the girl’s parents? Why didn’t the school do something? And for that matter what about the City, the cutlure, and all of human history? The narrator, Nora, has a lot of questions, and a limited time in which to find answers.
Only one or two of the songs below are actually referred to in the text, but they all have something to add, because this is a story that goes on and on, even after my characters are out of the frame.
Freeway - Aimee Mann
I doubt that Mann intended this song as a commentary on the 2008 stock market crash but, as one of the suddenly broke people listening to her “Fucking Smilers” record a lot that winter, what “you got a lot of money but you can’t afford the freeway” meant to me was: “you may still be rich by most Americans’ standards, but you’re screwed without health insurance!” And though I am not Nora, that is where her story starts in my novel: with a job settling lawsuits for the NYC Department of Education (the same job I managed to obtain in 2009).
Black Jack David - Loretta Lynn
Loretta Lynn no doubt heard this story of a sixteen-year old girl lured away from home by a handsome stranger when she was herself a young girl in Kentucky. It’s also the story behind the marriage between the teacher in my book and his much younger wife, who he picks up on a motorcycle ride through Appalachia in 1965.
Good Morning Schoolgirl - Junior Wells Chicago Blues Band
This blues classic, also memorably covered by the Grateful Dead, makes us all co-conspirators: “Tell your Mama and Papa, I’m a little schoolboy too!” (WINK WINK) I’ve been singing along with that lyric since I was a teenager, myself!
Stray Cat Blues - Rolling Stones
Another great song with terrible, terrible politics--so bad we even knew it, then.
I Don’t Do That Kind of Thing Anymore - Tracy Nelson
Though it has the raunchy, roadhouse vibe that usually made female subjugation sound like a party we all could enjoy, this track from "Tracy Nelson/Mother Earth (1972)” is actually a feminist anthem . The “kind of thing” the singer will no longer do enable her lover’s regression: “If I cling to the little boy, I lose the man.” Righteous!
Hey Nineteen - Steely Dan
Nineteen-year olds are legal, but the Dan have scruples, sort of… the hardest part for Becker and Fagen seems to be that the sweet young thing doesn’t know who Aretha Franklin is. Which is, of course, hard to bear.
King of the Road - Randy Travis
Here’s a song that you can enjoy without remorse. It celebrates only the pleasures of a rambling life. Randy Travis’s empty oildrum of a voice counterpoints Roger Miller’s “don’t pity me” lyrics perfectly. My character Bob Rasmussen could learn a thing or two from both these guys.
Young Girl - Gary Puckett and the Union Gap
This pop bauble was on the turntable at the first boy-girl party I attended (circa 1971) and I was soon a proud owner of the 45. It wasn’t until I caught wind of it on my car radio some forty years later that I took in the lyrics, which are possibly even more cringeworthy than “You’re Havin’ My Baby!”
Uncle Alvarez - Liz Phair
People remember Liz Phair for singing about sex, but this song about an unknown and unknowable family member is a gem. The line, “he’s not really part Cherokee-Indian” barely rhymes, is nearly unsingable, as well as politically incorrect, yet it sums everything up: This guy has concocted his own legend--just the sort of legend that seduces teenaged girls.
The Boat Family - The Roches
RIP Maggie Roche, you genius. I can’t explain this song, but its implied questions remind me of Nora (my narrator)’s: what part of the world’s pain am I responsible for? In light of my own privilege, what of my own pain is even worth mentioning? Is chocolate allowed? Must soybeans be so sad?
Motherless Children - Steve Miller Band
An eerie rock’n’roll version of a folk song credited to Odetta, but really a good deal older. Heard through the lens of my book, the lyric “Some people say/a sister will do” takes on a particularly dark tone, but I really include it here for the last verse, which describes for me where the child molesting teacher lands, forty years later:
I was lookin' for some place to plead my case
And I'm standing here all alone
I was framed, the times they have changed
And I don't know where I'm goin'.
Omie Wise - Doc Watson
A haunting, blame-the-victim, classic murder ballad: "Fool-like she met him at Adams’s Spring!"
Age Ain’t Nothin’ But a Number - Aaliyah
And lastly, danceable proof that in the girl’s mind she’s making her own choices and owning her own lust.
Rachel Cline and The Question Authority links:
Los Angeles Review of Books interview with the author
Red Book Star-Revue interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
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