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May 22, 2020
Tracy O'Neill's Playlist for Her Novel "Quotients"
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, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Brilliant and inventive, Tracy O'Neill's second novel Quotients is one of the year's most timely books.
Ploughshares wrote of the book:
"Beyond conspiratorial thrills, this is a book about intimacy and loyalties yearned for and lost . . . [We] are often unable to see through our faulty human screens of fears, illusions, and hopes, especially burdened by an increasingly fractional and artificial society. In Quotients, O’Neill tackles this blindness, and the result is a distinct, unconventional narrative with no easy conclusions."
In her own words, here is Tracy O'Neill's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Quotients:
It’s been so difficult for me to summarize Quotients. The couple at the center, Alexandra Chen and Jeremy Jordan, long to create a home together, even as they often are complicit in the divisions that threaten it. On the one hand, it’s a novel about people seeking safety, truth, and love. On the other, it’s about the way in which big data, state surveillance, and fractured online media contribute to a society in which danger, uncertainty, and polarization are ubiquitous. The songs in this playlist, however, touch on the unquantifiable moods and colors of the novel.
“La Vie en Rose” Louis Armstrong
Alexandra Chen is fundamentally someone who decides to see in pink, then is baffled when told she’s wearing tinted glasses. In one scene of Quotients, this song is playing at a restaurant. I imagined that she’s still have an attraction to romantic cliché even by the end of the novel.
“Enjoy the Silence” Depeche Mode
When Jeremy meets Alexandra, he wants to steal away from the world of intel. Depeche Mode sings, “Words like violence/Break the silence/Come crashing in/Into my little world/Painful to me/Pierce right through me.” This is not so far off from where he stands.
“At Home He’s a Tourist” Gang of Four
In one early draft, I had Jeremy listening to Gang of Four as a young man. Later, the scene was cut, but this sense of being not at home at home is central to the narrative.
“We Almost Lost Detroit” Gil Scott-Heron
Gil Scott-Heron captures the way one might both mourn for and warn a society in this song about a near loss of Detroit through shortsightedness. I wanted this novel to be imbued with some of this feeling.
“Sinnerman” Nina Simone
The restless energy of this song drawn out over length is beautiful and unsettling, capturing the simultaneous exhaustion and anxiety of running from the past. This phenomenon is what runs beneath the surface of Jeremy’s mostly collected demeanor.
“Closer” NIN
Throughout this book I’ve included epigraphs. At one point, I thought about using “You let me violate you/You let me desecrate you,” which I think captures the complicity of some of the characters in cycles of state surveillance and violence.
“Et si tu n’existais pas” Iggy Pop
This captures the combination of melancholy and love Jeremy feels for his family. He’s unable to experience love without an accompanying presentiment of loss.
“Tessellate” alt-J
I really love the creepy, nerdy vibe of this song, and when I first saw the cover for the book with the triangles, I thought of this song first.
“Different Pulses” Asaf Avidan
Both Alexandra and Jeremy believe that love can transform, though they aren’t always sure how to do it. They’re both a little lost, though neither would admit it, and hoping that love will click their lives into place. That is what this song is about too.
Tracy O'Neill is the author of The Hopeful, one of Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2015, and Quotients. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, long-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan Prize, and was a Narrative Under 30 finalist. In 2012, she was awarded the Center for Fiction's Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, LitHub, BOMB, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Literarian, New World Writing, Narrative, Scoundrel Time, Guernica, Bookforum, Electric Literature, Grantland, Vice, The Guardian, VQR, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her column Body Language appeared in Catapult. She attended the MFA program at the City College of New York and the PhD program in communications at Columbia University.
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Book Notes (2018 - ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2015 - 2017) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2012 - 2014) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 - 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
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