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November 8, 2019
Mary Fleming's Playlist for Her Novel "The Art of Regret"
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.
Mary Fleming's The Art of Regret is a vividly told and compelling novel.
The Indypendent wrote of the book:
"Beautifully written, tender, evocative, and moving, The Art of Regret is a cogent reminder that risk-taking is essential to a well-lived life. . . . No one wants to die staring down a bushel of regrets or lamenting a roster of should-haves. Both Helen and Trevor provoke us to figure out ways to make sure that we confront our demons, push boundaries and live as fully as possible. I, for one, want to thank Mary Fleming for the reminder."
In her own words, here is Mary Fleming's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Art of Regret:
This is the story of thirty-something Trevor McFarquhar, a disaffected American who has lived in Paris since age 8 when his mother moved him and his brother from New York, following the deaths of his father and sister. The remaining family has never talked about these deaths and this unresolved past has made Trevor crusty and contrary. Since many songs are about distress and unhappiness, there’s no shortage of music befitting his condition. Fortunately redemption is also a frequent musical theme and this novel is ultimately that, the story of Trevor being saved from his loneliness.
PLAYLIST
I AM A ROCK, Simon & Garfunkel
If ever there was a rock, an island, it is Trevor McFarquhar. He has done everything he can to build a fortress deep and mighty, to shield himself in his armor. The song could have been written for the man we meet at the beginning of the novel. He hides behind his books (or his camera), safe within in his room, claims to feel no pain. He is determined not to disturb the slumber of feelings that have died. Luckily for him, life has other things in mind for Trevor. A series of events will soften him up, bring him back to a larger land mass.
MY WAY, Frank Sinatra
Regrets, Trevor has actually had a lot. He’s turned the act into an art form. But he’s determined to do it his way, to go against the grain of everything in his past. He’ll work for a bicycle shop if it irritates his family. He’ll shun institutions like marriage just because it’s accepted practice in the bourgeois world he has grown up in. Though he is only in his mid-thirties when the story begins, Trevor thinks he’s facing the final curtain, that he’s done with living. The song was originally French, called “Comme d’Habitude” sung by crooner Claude François and it would have been playing a lot on the radio when Trevor first arrived in Paris in the 1960s. Paul Anka’s lyrics are completely different from the French. A lot can get lost in translation.
LA CHANSON DE PREVERT, Serge Gainsbourg
The Prévert song Gainsbourg is referring to is “les Feuilles Mortes,” another a Franco-American creation, like our protagonist. Originally written in French, it was translated by Johnny Mercer into “Autumn Leaves” and has been sung by or adapted instrumentally by almost every jazz great. Even Eric Clapton has a version. Gainsbourg sings to his lover about the Prévert song, saying the dying leaves bring back the memory of him. “Day after day dead loves never finish dying.” It too is a song of loss, though like the novel it ends on a positive note: “This song, les Feuilles Mortes, will be erased from my memory and that day my dead loves will have finished dying.” Beyond the song, there’s Gainsbourg himself, cigarette hanging from his lip, a model of the cool indifference Trevor tries to emanate, with limited success.
BICYCLE RACE, by Queen
Trevor runs a bike shop, Mélo-Vélo. But as with people, his relationship to these two-wheeled vehicles is complicated. He’d very much like to ride his bicycle but following an accident years earlier in his life, he’s lost faith in the physics of the thing. There’s an accelerating energy to the song, with a wonderful riff using bicycle bells. It feels like forward locomotion, what Trevor is resisting.
CHEZ LE PHOTOGRAPHE DU MOTEL, Miles Davis
Any one of the pieces on Miles Davis’ Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud (Elevator to the Gallows), composed for the eponymous Louis Malle film, could accompany this novel. It’s perfect Paris music: languid but subliminally tense, full of longing and loneliness. I’ve chosen this one (At the Motel Photographer’s) because Trevor is actually a photographer. The bicycle shop is a front, a way of choosing failure, is the way he puts it. Though the film was made in 1957, about 10 years before Trevor arrived in Paris, the city he first witnessed would have looked much as it does in the film. And photography is as revelatory in the dénouement of the film as it is in Trevor’s life.
LET DOWN, Radiohead
Not long into the book there is a major transit strike in Paris. The beginning of this song—“Transit, motorways and tramlines/Starting and then stopping…/The emptiest of feelings”—with its relentless beat captures the mood of that strike. The first half of the book is a lot about feeling let down: Trevor by his mother, his mother by him and at the end of Part I, it’s Trevor who feels let down by himself.
DETOUR AHEAD, sung by Billie Holiday
This song reminds me of the day of Trevor’s bicycle accident, which he recounts years after the fact. When he is taking a long ride in the French countryside on a smooth road, a clear day and ends up on that soft shoulder, unconscious and battered. He doesn’t “Wake up, slow down/Before you crash and break your heart/Gullible clown.” Trevor’s life is also one of detours. Away from his life as a photographer, away from his family and love but ultimately also away from his rock-island life.
GHOSTS, by Laura Marling
Trevor’s life is haunted by the ghosts of his father and sister, both of whom died when he was a boy. Like in the song, he can’t leave them behind; he’s still mourning them. The past follows us into the present. Though the song refers to past girlfriends, Trevor has had plenty of those too. And like the narrator of the song, he doesn’t believe in everlasting love. But people with such certain opinions about the world should be wary, as Trevor thankfully learns in the second half of the book.
MY FAVORITE THINGS, by John Coltrane
When Trevor visits his friend Béa late in the book, John Coltrane’s interpretation of the song from The Sound of Music is playing. Trevor didn’t know either the original or the instrumental jazz version. Since every American child of his age knows the song and the film by heart, his ignorance is a sign that he is in fact much more French than American. And Béa, who plays guitar and sings, awakens Trevor’s musical sensibilities as part of a general Call to Life.
TEARS IN HEAVEN, by Eric Clapton
A bit later in the story Béa actually plays and sings this song that Clapton wrote after the unspeakable tragedy of his four-year old son falling to his death from a Manhattan skyscraper window. She performs at the funeral of another child and it’s a particularly poignant moment in the story, especially for Trevor. It’s the first time he’s heard Béa sing and he’s deeply moved by it. And the funeral itself brings back memories of his own baby sister’s funeral. He’s both facing up to the past and making his story less personal. He’s not the only one to suffer such loss.
REDEMPTION SONG, by Bob Marley
Trevor’s story could be called The Road to Redemption. By confronting his past, he manages, as Bob Marley says, to emancipate himself from mental slavery, the thing that was holding him back all along. He learns that “none but ourselves can free our minds.” The Art of Regret is, in the end, a tale of hope.
Mary Fleming and The Art of Regret links:
Deborah Kalb interview with the author
Fiction Writers Review interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
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