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April 12, 2021
Avner Landes' Playlist for His Novel "Meiselman: The Lean Years"
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.
Avner Landes' novel Meiselman: The Lean Years is a dark, funny, and wholly engaging debut.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Landes’s darkly funny debut chronicles a suburban schlemiel’s endless capacity for self-sabotage....Meiselman’s delusions of grandeur repeatedly collide with reality, to tragic and hilarious effect....Fans of Shalom Auslander will appreciate this."
In his words, here is Avner Landes' Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Meiselman: The Lean Years:
Meiselman, the protagonist of my novel, Meiselman: The Lean Years, is constantly assessing his standing in the world, agonizing over whether he is winning or losing at any given moment. A person engaged in this much posturing has little interest or ability in discovering what it is that truly touches his soul. Incapable of identifying his desires, he lacks the knowhow to cultivate his tastes. It’s safe to assume that he’s definitely not much of a music fan.
As a teenager in the '90s, mixtapes were how we connected with people. The artists, the genres, the songs, all coalesced into a statement of who we were and who we weren’t. For example, a tune getting serious radio play never made it on to one of my tapes. And I always included several obscure bands. Maybe this brief history shows how we all posture, at times.
Side A of this playlist will feature songs by artists that appear in the book, while also imagining the type of music that someone with Meiselman’s personality would probably enjoy.
Side B is composed of songs that were helpful to me when writing the book. The Hungarian Pastry Shop in New York’s Morningside Heights is where I wrote the first draft of my novel. There is famously no WiFi in the shop, and I didn’t own a smartphone at the time, so my listening options were limited to my computer’s meager music library and whatever discs I’d bring along for the day.
Side A
Let Them Eat War—Bad Religion
The novel is set in 2004 against the backdrop of the insurgency in Iraq and the Bush-Kerry presidential election. What interests me about this period, as it relates to the book, is the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the idea of aggressors seeing themselves as victims. (The political elements of the book are subtle.) There aren’t many great anti-war albums from this period—is that even a thing anymore—but Bad Religion’s The Empire Strikes First is a great one and listening to it can get you angry about what happened all over again.
I Feel the Earth Move—Carole King
In baseball, walk-up music is as much a part of a player’s identity as his jersey number. This tradition started when Nancy Faust, the Chicago White Sox’s legendary organist, played the Carole King classic after the announcer Harry Caray remarked that the player Frank Howard was, “Too big to be a man, not big enough to be a horse.” I’m sure Meiselman, a man fanatically devoted to the White Sox, would probably make a point when attending games, like I did when I was a boy, to visit Faust’s booth and give her a wave, which she never failed to acknowledge with a smile and a nod, her hands staying on the keys.
Just As I Am—Willie Nelson
A woman in the gym who is always in a Willie Nelson concert tee catches Meiselman’s attention, and in an effort to connect with the woman, who he will eventually marry, Meiselman purchases two Nelson albums. Meiselman doesn’t care for Red Headed Stranger or The Essential Willie Nelson: “Could this Willie Nelson not afford more instruments and a better microphone? Thirty seconds was the most Meiselman could take of any song, every one sounding like a drunken lament over a child’s strumming.” It’s a shame because I can imagine an alternate version of his story, one where the crunching piano chords of “Just As I Am” forces Meiselman to sit up straighter and listen, and when he hears the words, “Just as I am, though tossed about/With many a conflict, many a doubt/Fightings and fears within, without/O Lamb of God, I come, I come” Meiselman breaks down and vows to become a better man.
Everything—Alanis Morissette
Meiselman peruses back issues of Interview magazine for inspiration as he prepares questions for an upcoming speaker at the library where he works as the Events and Programs Coordinator. An interview with Alanis Morissette catches his attention, leading to some uncharitable thoughts about the singer. He calls her answers “highfalutin nonsense.” From what we know of Deena, Meiselman’s wife, she’d clearly be a fan and excited about the new album So-Called Chaos, and he’s just the type of awful husband who wouldn’t allow her to enjoy it in peace, but would feel the necessity to layer the song with his nasty opinions.
Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)—Billy Joel
Meiselman listens to an all-news station in the car, and I don’t think he’s terribly into music, but I imagine him to be a Billy Joel fan, the type of kid who foolishly imagined that memorizing the lyrics to “We Didn’t Start the Fire” would earn him respect from the other kids in the class. The events of 9/11 are very much on the minds of the book’s characters, and I suspect Meiselman would find the lyrics of “Miami 2017” to be eerily prescient.
Side B
Now They’ll Sleep—Belly
Everyone loved Star the first album, and I loved loving the follow-up that most people mistakenly dismissed as disappointing because that’s what people like to do with follow-ups. Both records were always a key part of my morning writing routine. Her lyrics are beautiful images, and Tanya Donelly’s phrasing is crystal clear. The music sounds as if it’s slowing down for her, waiting for her to deliver, as if she’s carefully considering the next word based on its sound. Her singing reminds me to slow down, to not put the cart before the horse, the paragraph before the sentence, and to remember that the sound should dictate the story and not the other way around.
Chartered Trips—Hüsker Dü
If this song and a cup of coffee don’t knock the sleep out of you…And it’s not just the blistering fuzz of Bob Mould’s guitar. What I love about this song is the layers of emotions, how the listener hears the excitement of a young man leaving home to start his life, but only briefly before the panic sets in. His resolve starts to crumble, as his anxiety and exhilaration duel. Mould creates a scene and lets the audience decide what do with it. This is what it means when we talk about allowing the reader to feel something. It’s not directing the reader what to feel but creating for her a range of possibilities, and this is accomplished by not being intentional when it comes to mood.
Spread It ‘Round—Phish
Every good mixtape needs a deep cut, something to prove the erudition of its creator. Jam band music is just about the only music I can listen to when working and Phish is a favorite. This song debuted at a concert in 2003 and was only played twice before being shelved. Fans seem to hate it. What’s being spread around is love, and the lyrics are, no doubt, on the cheesy side: “So if it’s love you’ve found, don’t ever trade it.” The music is also somewhat lifeless and repetitive, but I love getting lost in the repetition. I do love this song, although I’m not sure why it ended up being one of my most played songs during the writing the book. Perhaps it acted as a constant reminder to be secure in my own tastes. Perhaps I’m just not afraid to speak so openly about love.
God Bless the Child—Billie Holiday
When I was probably around eighteen, Dana, the sister of one of my oldest and dearest friends, bought me a Billie Holiday compilation. I’d never had any interest in jazz or swing, but she insisted I’d love it. It didn’t hit me, at first, and for years it worked its way to the bottom of my stack of discs. One day, when working, my head was spitting out thoughts too rapidly, as sometimes happens, so I put it on to slow things down, and it did the trick. It’s not just the calmness of Holiday’s voice, the way she lingers on the vowels. But she has truths to share, and they range from optimism to despair, sometimes in the same breath. “Them that's got shall have/Them that's not shall lose/So the Bible said and it still is news.”
Lost in the Supermarket—The Clash
The writer Nathan Englander once remarked that when you are working on a novel, you begin to see the novel and its ideas and themes in everything you encounter—books, news stories, interactions with people. This is true. The loneliness of this song, more than any other song, reminds me of my character Meiselman. That the person in the song goes unnoticed is bad enough. But he also can’t fully notice what is around him.
Avner Landes earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University, and works as a ghostwriter. He grew up in Skokie, Illinois, in a family that came to Chicagoland in the early 1900s; he now lives near Tel Aviv with his wife and two children. Find him on Twitter: @AvnerLandes
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