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August 12, 2021
Alexandra Kleeman's Playlist for Her Novel "Something New Under the Sun"
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.
Alexandra Kleeman contrasts the banal to the catastrophic powerfully in her wonderfully upsetting novel Something New Under the Sun.
Vulture wrote of the book:
"Throughout, Kleeman writes expressively about place and the manifold ways our lives are shaped by our imperiled environment, foregrounding the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change and its attendant anxieties."
In her own words, here is Alexandra Kleeman's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Something New Under the Sun:
When I think about Los Angeles, I think about music. First, other people's music: the way a song sounds when you catch only a tatter of it coming out the window of a car that's driving sleekly past you, fading in and fading out before you have a chance to orient yourself within the sound, to remember what song it is or even identify what you're hearing. The sound of radio and mariachi and rap and Top 40s pop coming from the cars around you when you're stuck in unending gridlock on the 101, mixing together in a slurry of different voices and volumes and instruments and rhythms. Through a rolled down window, the hot sun and hotter concrete bake the mixture into an unstable whole, a temporary sonic edifice torn apart when the traffic gets moving once again.
Then there's the homegrown music that resembles the LA I love to get lost in, by foot or by car. Woozy, hypnagogic stuff that mixes decades-old styles and heterogenous production values the way a painter mixes color. Surf and sunshine pop, '80s synths and '60s radio classics come together in an updated, self-conscious psychedelia, like a covers band reinterpreting songs that never existed on the basis of a trove of old records they found in an estate sale, warped and half-melted in the heat--stuff like Connan Mockasin (Australian, and not on this mix), Ariel Pink (not on this mix because life's too short to listen to MAGA music), Dirty Beaches, Drugdealer. Also the car music, for nighttime driving, gleaming and synthetic, chilly in its smoothness, made for transit in between the low light of a bar and the bright, fervent neons of a concert venue or fast food parking lot.
I take mixes too seriously. Because I was raised thinking of the mixtape as a sacred unit of interpersonal communication, a finite little lifeboat of song, I agonize over what should make the cut and what shouldn't. Because platforms like Spotify allow easy and instantaneous rearrangement, I obsess over the transitions, the overall flow, the right number of songs or length of total play to make the playlist still feel as complete and unitary as a mixtape or mix CD. And then, what should its relationship be to the arc of the novel? Should it follow the plot arc or the character arc? Should it be thought of as a cinematic soundtrack, or as a space mirroring the vibe of the book?
I put together this mix in a way that maps roughly to the overall shape of the book, which was inspired for me by the argument made by Joanna Zylinska in her monograph The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse. My pre-apocalyptic novel, Something New Under the Sun, begins as a Hollywood story that gradually is subsumed by the apocalyptic consequences of WAT-R, a manufactured water substitute that's consumed by all but the very wealthiest of SoCal residents. We begin the novel following Patrick Hamlin, an east coast novelist who comes west to work on the set of a film, but as the book goes on the story hews closer to Cassidy Carter, the troubled starlet who Patrick is assigned to chauffeur around. The mix replicates this same handoff, from the male-heavy rock of the mix's beginning, to the clubbier feminine-tilting jams of the later half. And then at the end...a moment to be alone and think before it all comes to an end and the credits roll.
I worked on this mix while walking long distances under Palm Desert summer temperatures, while running in Villa Pamphili in Rome, around Twin Lakes in Gunbarrel, Colorado, along the waterfront in Vancouver, Washington, and finally in my home in Staten Island. I hope that you'll enjoy it, and listen to it wherever you like!
Alexandra Kleeman is the author of Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among other publications, and her other writing has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Her work has received fellowships and support from Bread Loaf, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She is the winner of the Berlin Prize and the Bard Fiction Prize, and was a Rome Prize Literature Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She lives in Staten Island and teaches at the New School.
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