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March 9, 2020
William Boyle's Playlist for His Novel "City of Margins"
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, Roxane Gay, and many others.
William Boyle's City of Margins is a dark, gritty, and imaginatively told literary crime novel.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Outstanding. Battered by loss and unrealized dreams, Boyle’s characters are vividly drawn and painfully real. Fans of literary crime novelists such as George Pelecanos and Richard Price will be highly rewarded."
In his own words, here is William Boyle's Book Notes music playlist for his novel City of Margins:
My new novel, City of Margins, is set in Southern Brooklyn in the early 1990s. It’s a memory piece with a large cast. Music plays a part in the lives of most of the characters, particularly Donna Rotante, whose son Gabe committed suicide as a teenager and who now seeks solace in her turntable and crates of records, and young Antonina Divino, who finds escape via a mixtape made by her best friend. Other characters—Donnie Parascandolo, a disgraced ex-cop; Mikey Baldini, a college dropout; Ralph Sottile, Donnie’s sidekick; wannabe writer Nick Bifulco and his mother, Ava—access their lives and histories through music, too. Mikey’s got band posters on his wall. There’s a jukebox at the local dive. CDs were available, but these characters are happy with their vinyl and their cassettes. Some of the songs I’ve chosen here had a tonal influence on the book, while others appear over the course of the narrative or simply reverberate through the walls of the story.
“City Drops Into the Night,” The Jim Carroll Band
One of the book’s epigraphs comes from this song. The older I get and the more I write about where I’m from, the more I realize that Catholic Boy is probably my greatest touchstone. It sounds most like the city and people I write about, seems to set the tone for everything. When I started work on City of Margins, this is the song I kept putting the needle back on. There’s such desperation, such yearning. It’s the perfect soundtrack for self-destruction. “I’m the fire’s reflection . . .”
“Wild in the Streets,” Garland Jeffreys
Ghost Writer is an album that shows up in the book, part of Donna’s sacred collection. It’s also part of my sacred collection, and it’d certainly be on any Mount Rushmore of New York City records I’d make. More than that, though, it’s a huge tonal influence. Something about this song in particular echoes the bigger sound I was going for here. Since it’s an ensemble novel, it’s the perfect song to encapsulate what it feels like to be lost on the streets in the city, to be hunting hard for answers on concrete.
“Paths That Cross,” Patti Smith
From 1988’s Dream of Life. A beautiful and haunting song that sonically resembles paths crossing, a perfect evocation of the way these broken characters are webbed together through chance and coincidence.
“Tarantula,” This Mortal Coil
In the book, high school student Antonina has a mixtape her best pal made her. This song is on there. I love thinking about the innocence of discovering music that way. It’s something that seems to be totally lost. Not to wax nostalgic but you hear a song now and the band’s whole catalogue is at your fingertips, devoured promiscuously. Back then, a friend might put a song on a mix and—depending on how tuned in you were—it could very well be the only song you knew by that band for a while. Such wonder. I love to imagine Antonina staring at the track list and thinking, Who is This Mortal Coil? What does this song mean? For a kid raised on Madonna, this is a sound that shatters her.
“Sweet Jane,” Cowboy Junkies
I feel fairly certain that I heard the Cowboy Junkies version of “Sweet Jane” before I heard the original from the Velvet Underground. It’s among the best covers ever because it makes something different of the song. If VU’s original (which is perfect) struts, this cover crawls. A song that’s triumphant and wild is pulled down to the earth and buried in a shallow grave. This is also on Antonina’s mix, and I love to think of her getting lost in the whisper of it.
“Look Out for My Love,” Neil Young
Mikey and Donna listen to Neil Young’s Comes a Time on their second meeting. It’s about as close as I’ve come to writing a romantic scene, two broken characters finding respite in each other. This is the song that really matches the tone of the encounter. I remember being in college and listening to Neil Young seriously for the first time, just feeling wrecked by his voice in the best way.
“Busload of Faith,” Lou Reed
New York is another Mount Rushmore NYC record, and Reed was one of the city’s most important documenters. It was released in 1989, but I didn’t hear it until about ’94 or ’95 when I started to get into the Velvet Underground and Reed’s solo records thanks to my pal Anthony. To me, New York is a great NYC novel. It feels and moves like the city, is full of well-worn despair and yearning. This song reminds me of the character of Ava Bifulco in City of Margins, an overworked widow whose life intersects with a Good Samaritan who also happens to be a bad man.
“Atlantic City,” Bruce Springsteen
When I was a kid what I knew was “Born in the U.S.A.” and I didn’t like it. I didn’t get it, of course. My Springsteen conversion actually started with James Mangold's Cop Land, where Sylvester Stallone’s Sherriff Freddy Heflin listens to The River. I scored used vinyl copies of The River and Nebraska at Kim’s Underground soon after seeing it, and I was all in. When I first listened to “Atlantic City,” I felt like I’d heard the best song there ever was or ever would be. I’d already seen and loved Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, and I’d been to Atlantic City with my grandfather a couple of times and knew what it represented in the popular imagination, a sort of middle ground between Coney Island and Las Vegas. Donna plays this for Mikey in the book and remembers when she first heard it—it’s one of those songs that shapes and defines a life.
“Innocent When You Dream (Barroom),” Tom Waits
I love Tom Waits so damn much, but I usually wind up leaving his songs off playlists for my books because the choice feels too on the nose. But City of Margins exists somewhere on the wavelength between Frank’s Wild Years and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, where Waits plays Earl Piggott. It also feels fitting that I first heard this song (and had my first exposure at all to Waits) on the soundtrack to Wayne Wang and Paul Auster’s beautiful and somehow nearly forgotten Smoke, a film that changed the way I wanted to tell stories.
“This Is All I Ask,” Frank Sinatra
Sinatra’s version is from September of My Years in 1965, though Gordon Jenkins wrote the song in 1958 and it was performed by many others. I grew up with Sinatra in the air, and I return to many of his records, especially his “suicide songs” and the vastly underrated Watertown. I generally don’t sleep well and often listen to music through the night. While I was working on City of Margins, September of My Years was one of those records I’d listen to on repeat all night. It’s full of questions and requests, of a desire for youth and immortality. There’s a thread of deep darkness in a haunting song like “This Is All I Ask”: “Beautiful girls, walk a little slower when you walk by me / Lingering sunsets, stay a little longer with the lonely sea / Children everywhere, when you shoot at bad men, shoot at me / Take me to that strange, enchanted land grown-ups seldom understand.” Felt right to give it to hangdog cop Ralph Sottile—through this song, he can reflect on who he was and why he lived and all the ways he failed.
“Diary of a Lover,” Johnny Thunders
There always has to be some Johnny Thunders. This one, from Hurt Me, sounds like something that would play at a sad junkie prom, a combination of neon lights and leaking pipes. It feels like cotton candy wallpaper in a dive bar. A good song to fade away to.
“Troubled Times,” Screaming Trees
Some Screaming Trees. Such a gristly song. For me, Mark Lanegan’s voice threads from the early ’90s to now, one of those rare singers who I’ve listened to consistently for thirty years. This feels like a tonal match for the whole book, but especially for the character of Mikey Baldini, college dropout, a mix of John Fante’s Arturo Bandini and Peter Falk’s Mikey from Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky.
“Daddy’s Little Girl,” Nikki D
I recently rewatched Leslie Harris’s 1992 film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., a great NYC film and a total document of the era. The use of this song is magnificent and feels like it could apply to Antonina’s experience in the book. I love the “Tom’s Diner” sample.
“About You,” The Jesus and Mary Chain
Mikey has a Jesus and Mary Chain poster over his bed in the room where he spends almost no time in the book, except when he’s packing up to escape. But, no doubt, he had Darklands on tape and listened to it over and over on his Walkman and boombox. “About You” starts like this: “I can see / That you and me / Live our lives in the pouring rain / And the raindrops beat out of time to our refrain / And you and me / Will win, you’ll see / People die in their living rooms / But they do not need this God almighty gloom.” It could’ve been an epigraph to the book, too. It’s a song for Mikey and Donna, but it also works for so many of the characters.
“When You Close Your Eyes,” Carly Simon
Donna turns to No Secrets at a particularly rough time in the book. She’s leaned on this song before and will lean on it again. This is one of those records she’ll haul around wherever she goes, no matter what trouble finds her.
“End of the Line (Live in NY, 1965),” Nina Simone
I feel like closing credits played differently on VHS than they do streaming or on DVD/Blu-ray or even on film. Something was inherently sadder, more weathered. I’ve been saying that City of Margins is a double VHS tale, and this is the song for when the credits roll at the end of that second tape. After Hours was the first Nina Simone record I ever bought, plucked from a recommendation shelf at Rhino Records in New Paltz, NY. I wore that CD out, listening on repeat night after night. “End of the Line” is the song from Saint Nina for the dark after the story.
William Boyle is from Brooklyn, New York. His books include: Gravesend, which was nominated for the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere in France and shortlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger in the UK; The Lonely Witness, which is nominated for the Hammett Prize; and, most recently, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
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