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August 22, 2022
David Leo Rice's Playlist for His Novel "The New House"
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.
David Leo Rice's novel The New House is a coming of age story as engaging as it is unsettling.
In his own words, here is David Leo Rice's Book Notes music playlist for his novel The New House:
My new novel, The New House, is about a family of Jewish outsider artists roaming the American interior in search of “The New Jerusalem,” which they see as the mythic town where their journey will finally end. Along the way, they embed in a town where the 12-year-old son, Jakob, gets drawn into the orbit of a reclusive German artist named Wilhelm Wieland, whose secrets begin to form or deform Jakob’s nascent inner world.
“Joseph Cornell” by The Clientele
The earliest external sparks for this novel were the Greek movie Dogtooth and the shadow boxes of the surrealist collage artist Joseph Cornell. He lived his whole life on Utopia Parkway in Queens and designed his own micro-universe by reassembling trinkets, toys, and trash that he collected while roaming all over New York City, on foot or on his bicycle. This song is a tribute to him.
The feeling of inhabiting NYC as a local who sees it as somewhere to be from rather than somewhere to go to, is evocative in a way that comparatively few artists in the city can relate to—for me, it’ll always be the place where I went to become a writer, leaving the town of my origin behind, just as Jakob in the novel toys with doing—so to imagine Cornell experiencing it as a garden of earthly delights that he was born into always stirs my heart. For a literary meditation on Cornell’s mysterious persona and creative methods, I highly recommend Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy.
“Twisted Fate” by Suitcase Junket
I stumbled across this performer at a music festival in Greenfield, MA when I went there with my parents in the summer of 2019. He’s exactly the kind of solitary tinkerer that Jakob in the novel is patterned on—someone who plays (and seems to have also found or made) all the instruments in his act, from a jangly guitar to a series of foot-pedal drums and other ramshackle percussion instruments, to the yodeling/throat-singing sound that he often makes in lieu of a guitar solo.
This type of true “one-man band,” building up his own sound out of found materials while synthesizing classic American musical styles and imagery (“a poor lost soul abandoned down on the riverside… waiting for the floods of summer, praying to be taken away”) is the kind of outsider savant who lives in The New House. He’s a type of lonely but luminous soul that America is particularly good at producing, even as the road for such souls in America is never an easy one. Therein, for me, lies both the beauty and the tragedy of this country.
“Northern Sky” by Nick Drake
In terms of outsider artists who create a distinctly personal world by filtering in an idiosyncratic, quasi-religious relationship with the landscape they happen to inhabit, Nick Drake is among the finest. His voice cuts as deep as anyone’s. Much more classically beautiful than those of the Suitcase Junket, Drake’s songs are both heartbreaking and reassuring in their celebration of a quiet, remote, rural existence, far from the bustle and “scene” of, in his case, London, and, in the case of the family in The New House, NYC and the “Art World” it contains.
With Jakob’s character I wanted to capture the feeling of childhood dreaming and improvisation that only comes from the kind of productive boredom and alienation of children left fully, maybe even dangerously, to their own devices—children whose lack of acceptance in the outside world leads to an extra-rich interiority, as in the films The Reflecting Skin and Leolo. Nick Drake’s music seems to flow out of this sense of astonished childhood attention, where magic is all around us and takes nothing to summon forth, even if there’s no one to share it with.
“Something’s Goin’ Down in Waco” from David Koresh Superstar by The Indelicates
Another theme of this book is the way that cultish thinking inevitably ends up in violent conflict with the outside world, for better—this conflict can rescue children from the prisons they were raised in, and allow them to become adults on their own terms—and for worse, in that it can also destroy whatever authentic vision those children might have nurtured inside themselves, and force their absorption into a mass culture they wanted nothing to do with.
Last spring, just as the world was starting to come out of lockdown, I went on a road trip with my friend Paul—with whom I host the Wake Island podcast—from Austin to Minneapolis. Along the way, we stopped at the site of the Waco Standoff where we visited the Branch church, drove along the road made famous from nonstop TV coverage in the 90s, and saw the burned-out remnants of the buildings where so many children were imprisoned by Koresh and then incinerated during the infamous FBI siege. I discovered this concept album, which tells the entire story of Koresh’s rise and fall, upon my return.
“Famous Blue Raincoat” by Leonard Cohen
Early in the novel, Jakob is subjected to a homeschooling regimen in which he’s instructed that he belongs to a lineage of “Visionary Jews,” in the center of the Venn diagram between the “Dogmatic Jews,” who keep fast to the established religion and/or support the modern state of Israel, and the “Neurotic Jews,” who have assimilated into mainstream American life and, with Freud as their forebear, sublimated their capacity for Jewish vision into a neurotic inner monologue. The Visionary Jews are the great Jewish artists—Kafka, Chagall, Lispector, Rothko, Pinter, Cronenberg—who embody what the family sees as the essential aspects of the Jewish mind within the game of Gentile culture.
Among these heroes, Leonard Cohen has pride of place. I could’ve chosen any of his songs, but I thought this one fit best since it dwells on the idea of building a “little house deep in the desert,” which fits nicely with the book’s concept of a new Exodus that sees America as simultaneously Egypt and Israel, a logic-defying new world that we can only escape from by escaping into.
Cohen was exactly such a seeker, restlessly journeying through the North American desert of the twentieth century, ever in search of transcendence. This song also has a spooked wintry quality that harmonizes with the central section of the novel, where Jakob is lost in the woods in the dead of winter.
“Daytona Sand” by Orville Peck
This is my favorite song of 2022. Following on the theme of reinventing the past in order to find a livable future, I love how Peck sings about his longing to return “home to Mississippi,” even as his persona is, in reality, a garish cartoon cowboy created by a guy from South Africa. The pathos of the song comes from this disjunct, which plays on the desire for a home that is only reachable through pop culture and the collective nostalgia of country music, with its attendant imagery of dive bars, rodeos, open roads, one-night stands, wild horses, etc. The ways in which this home is both realer and less accessible than it would be if he actually were from Mississippi is a version of the same conundrum that the family faces in the book.
“Ever South” by Drive-By Truckers
Speaking of actually being from Mississippi (or Alabama, anyway), this is a much more sober and somber take on the American immigrant experience. Patterson Hood’s invocation of his “distant Irish kin” moving down through Appalachia and ever south from there, seeking a better life while telling drunken stories of the good old days, may seem to come from a world totally different from that of the Jewish diaspora in The New House, but it’s part of the same grand American narrative, the same glory and trauma with which so many families extended themselves across this land, cultivating a mythology that was both personal and communal with each successive generation, spurred by the endless alternation of hope and disappointment (“eyes cut to the future, hearts tied to the past”). This song is not only a great example of the overlap between folk, country, and southern rock—it’s also a narrative about how those quintessentially American genres came to be.
“Deutschland” by Rammstein
As a counterpart to the narrative of diaspora, Rammstein’s “Deutschland” is a brilliant piece of campy hard rock—with a genius music video, one of the great short films of recent years—about being rooted in an ancient land weighed down by some of the heaviest history on earth. As Jakob gets closer to Wieland, who may have played his own role in Germany’s dark past, the idea of Germany as both the antithesis to the Jewish experience and an emblematic version of it—many of the greatest works of Jewish thought, from Kafka to Arendt to Einstein to Marx to Joseph Roth to Freud to Wittgenstein, were written in German, after all—becomes an obsession for him, as it was for me during my early twenties, when I studied the German language, then lived in Germany and wrote what would become my novel Angel House.
Before that, I wrote my college thesis about the role of the woods in German mythology and literature, so I was particularly struck by how the video for this song opens in a deep German forest famous for having repelled a Roman invasion in 16 AD. Thereafter, this impenetrable wood became a symbol of the “ultra-rootedness” of German culture, often presented in stark opposition to the encroachment of Jewish relativism and liberalism, represented in German myths as mushrooms eating away at the roots of the mighty oaks. I wanted to play with this ominous symbology in the woods section of The New House, while reflecting on the allure that the woods held for me when I was growing up in New England.
“Jazz on the Autobahn” by The Felice Brothers
Nothing’s more German than the Autobahn, that combination of the extreme mechanical innovation of German cars with the death drive that Freud so eloquently unpacked. Another aspect of The New House is a running thread of apocalypticism, a desperate and giddy fear that the family can’t reach its true home until the world ends. I began writing this book in 2018, when a spirit of apocalypticism was coursing through America, a sense that there was no tangible or near-term future within reach, only stagnation on the one hand and violent rapture on the other.
The jangly, speed-freak paranoia of this song gets at that feeling, with its many visions of how the apocalypse might or might not play out (“She said this is what the apocalypse will look like… a tornado with human eyes… poisoned birdbaths and torrents of chemical rain… like the heads of state hyperventilating in clouds of methane… sundown on the human heart…”), and the ways that it both will and will not be how anyone imagined it: “It won't look like those old frescoes, man, I don't think so… There will be no angels with swords, man, I don't think so… No jubilant beings in the sky above… And it won't look like those old movies neither… There will be no drag racing through the bombed-out streets… No shareholders will be orbiting the earth… The successful sons of businessmen will set their desks on fire… While 5-star generals of the free world weep in the oil choked tide.”
Sounds about right to me.
“In the New Jerusalem” sung by Glenna Campbell
This is a beautiful hymn about the “New Jerusalem,” where we’ll all arrive “when the toils of life are over and we lay our armor down.” Whether or not one grants credence to the possibility of a biblical heaven, the mind requires some space beyond the horrors in the previous song—some place of ultimate tranquility that has to exist, even if it doesn’t. The vocal performance in this song argues eloquently that it does.
“I’m Ready to Go Home” by The Louvin Brothers
This is the perfect song to end on, combining hope and terror in the way that only tortured religious music from the American South can. Every journey, of course, does end, though the reality of that end is often a long way from what the fantasy made it out to be. “But now I see the sun for me is setting… I have reached the ending of my way,” the brothers sing, with a precisely calibrated mixture of reverie and recoil.
It’s hard to get less Jewish than the Louvin Brothers, but the spirit in their harmonies transcends culture and creed to touch on a universal plane that, I have to believe, everyone is at least partially cognizant of, whatever form that cognizance may take. You can’t finish writing a novel until you’re “ready to go home,” and you can’t start the next one until you begin to fear the home you’ve arrived at isn’t yet your real home which, as ever, lies just a little further down the road.
David Leo Rice is a writer from Northampton, MA, currently living in NYC. His stories and essays have appeared in The Believer, Catapult, Black Clock, DIAGRAM, The Collagist, Fanzine, and elsewhere.
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