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March 2, 2022
Jane Pek's Playlist for Her Novel "The Verifiers"
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.
Jane Pek's novel The Verifiers is an engrossing literary thriller as much about modern technology as it is the relationships of its characters.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"The world of social media, big tech and internet connectivity provides fertile new ground for humans to deceive, defraud and possibly murder one another. . . . Well rendered and charming. . . . Original and intriguing."
In her own words, here is Jane Pek's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Verifiers:
My protagonist Claudia Lin’s favourite band is called Symposium, and at one point in the novel she describes it thus: “a four-member pop group from Athens, Georgia—rather aptly, given that their songs are brilliant riffs on Greek myths, which some unenlightened people such as [her best friend] Max think is gimmicky but is in fact fucking genius.”
It was important to me that Claudia have a favourite band, because she’s someone who would—by her nature, and given where she is in life, which is in New York City in her mid-twenties trying to figure out what she wants to do—and also because The Verifiers is in part a book about tastes and preferences and how they are shaped. It was also important that this band be fictional. I didn’t want to date the book, beyond it taking place “circa early twenty-first century”; plus, real-life pop culture references are freighted with pre-existing connotations.
I came up with the concept for Symposium so I would have an organising theme for any songs cited in the novel. At one point I thought of including song lyrics as an epigraph for each chapter, but quickly determined that was far beyond my lyric-writing capabilities. In the final version of the novel, two specific songs are referenced:
The Boy in the Borrowed Armour
This song is about Patroclus borrowing Achilles’s armour to impersonate him on the battlefield of Troy, and also about a boy who is in love with his high school best friend. It’s one of Claudia’s all-time favourite songs, and she hears it playing in her brother Charles’s car as he’s driving her home from Flushing after their visit to their mother. It turns out Charles’s girlfriend, Jessie, made Charles a Symposium playlist, as Jessie is also a fan of the group—a fact that surprises Claudia, who has assumed that Jessie is “that kind of Asian” who would “be more into classical music, that kind of thing.”
A Thousand Ships
Claudia listens to this song as she’s waiting for her sister Coraline to get ready for a charity gala they’re attending (on Claudia’s part, in an effort to wrangle a confession from a suspected murderer). It’s a telling of the Trojan War from Helen’s perspective, as well as a commentary on the privilege and burden of beauty in a society that prizes it so highly.
In terms of inspirations for Symposium, I drew upon the music I listened to when I was in New York City in my mid-twenties trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Below are (a few of) the songs, and bands, that evoke that time in my life for me.
Piazza, New York Catcher, Belle and Sebastian
Belle and Sebastian is probably the real-life band that comes closest to my idea of Symposium—an indie-pop band with catchy, wistful melodies and witty, tender lyrics that encompass a wide range of references; the title of my fictional song The Boy in the Borrowed Armour is an homage to their song (and album) The Boy with an Arab Strap. Piazza, New York Catcher remains my favourite song of theirs. To be wandering around San Francisco young and in love, talking about books: every time I hear the lines “ . . . tenderly you tell/About the saddest book you ever read, it always makes you cry”, I think I would fall in love with that person too.
Eighties Fan, Camera Obscura
There is a sadness to this song, and a wanting, that feels to me very young. It makes me think of someone who is all jaded and angsty and insecure, and at the same time incredibly hopeful, who can’t wait for their real life to begin.
Nothing Better, The Postal Service
One of the best songs about a break-up that I’ve heard, told from both sides.
Gimme Sympathy, Metric
This is so grand and rousing and anthemic. Listening to it always made me feel like I was roaring down the freeway of my youth with no time to even catch my breath.
Oxford Comma, Vampire Weekend
I still remember my then-roommate coming back to the tiny apartment we shared in the West Village and telling me about the concert she’d been to, with an opening act called Vampire Weekend. For me this song, and Vampire Weekend’s entire debut album, is the soundtrack of a particular Brooklyn summer, one spent cycling across the Williamsburg Bridge, watching outdoor movies in the then-emptied McCarren Park Pool, going to concerts at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, sitting on the grass of the Red Hook Ball Fields eating pupusas and huaraches from the Latin American food vendors all around, wanting things to remain the way they were forever.
Jane Pek was born and grew up in Singapore. She holds a BA from Yale University, a JD from the New York University School of Law, and an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. Her short fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Witness, Conjunctions, Literary Hub, and twice in The Best American Short Stories. She currently lives in New York, where she works as a lawyer at a global investment company.
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