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August 26, 2022
Lauren Acampora's Playlist for Her Novel "The Hundred Waters"
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.
Lauren Acampora's novel The Hundred Waters is a rewarding and unsettling literary pageturner.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"Take The Talented Mr. Ripley, cross it with Suspiria, add a dash of La La Land and mix it all at midnight and this arty psychological stalker novel is what might result."
In her own words, here is Lauren Acampora's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Hundred Waters:
The Hundred Waters tells the story of Louisa Rader, a woman who’s returned to her lush Connecticut hometown after exhausting her twenties in New York City as a fashion model and aspiring photographer, running with the downtown art scene. Now she’s back in Nearwater raising a preteen daughter with her successful architect husband and spending her days trying to revitalize the town’s sleepy art center. Trouble begins when she meets her husband’s new clients, an aristocratic Austrian family with a teenaged son named Gabriel, an ambitious young artist and environmental activist. Gabriel is unpredictable and charismatic, and both Louisa and her daughter fall under his spell.
At its core, this is a novel about art and how it can launch us out of routine and comfort. Humans have a deep-seated need for friction and challenge—a need that only creativity can productively fill. In the absence of creativity, frustration and ennui take root and lead to trouble. It’s also a novel about growing up versus growing old, and the dogged persistence of youthful patterns that pull us into the past. We’re all susceptible to restlessness and movement—whether forward or backward—despite the consequences. In the book, the city and suburbs act as a kind of yin and yang, dark and light, in alternating currents. The city represents darkness and nihilism, but it also symbolizes light, youth, and hope. Although Gabriel’s artistic vision is seemingly nihilistic, fixated on environmental disaster, making art is an act of faith for him in the face of certain catastrophe. Ultimately, the story is a celebration of this kind of stubborn faith, the necessity of embracing light and dark at once, acknowledging despair while willfully continuing onward.
More than anything I’ve written, this novel was born from music. The music, too, alternates from dark to light, from despair to hope and back again.
“The Passenger,” Iggy Pop
This is the song that started the book. For a while, The Passenger was even its working title. For me, this is an anthem of downtown NYC. I associate it with my own years there, particularly the nights/mornings I spent at an underground after-hours club on Ridge Street called “Art Space” or something like that. You needed a password to get in, and it was dark, dirty, and exciting. I remember “The Passenger” playing there one night, and how it seemed to encapsulate the driving momentum of that scene, its instant attractions and bad decisions, and the feeling of emerging into the gray morning light of the Lower East Side. Louisa’s character, now coddled in the suburbs, is nostalgic for this. In my mind, the lyrics of the song would make her think of her doomed ex-boyfriend Xavier: “He sees the stars he knows are his, he sees the bright and hollow sky.”
“Dedicated to the One I Love,” The Mamas and the Papas
At first, I thought of this book as a movie. But I had no idea how to make a movie, so I wrote it as a novel instead. Still, I always imagined that this song that would play during the last scene of the film, its crescendo coming just as the plane takes off (no spoilers). There’s a haunting sweetness about it that seems to underline the novel’s chiaroscuro.
“She’s Lost Control,” Joy Division
Here’s another song that comes to mind when I think of Louisa’s time in New York. From the book: “Nights in strangers’ apartments, beaded curtains, a man’s leather pants on the floor, a woman asleep in a bra, a fish tank with eels. A bottle of mezcal with a worm at the bottom, lipstick around the rim. The old music, raw and insistent… Sitting on a fuzzy toilet seat cover, watching the bathroom tiles change places.”
“Marquee Moon,” Television
Although Louisa’s time in New York was chronologically more 1990s than 70s or 80s, I still associate her art scene with the grittier era of downtown punk, and this is one of the songs that play in my head.
“Cello Song," Nick Drake
I imagine this song coming through the ceiling from overhead when Louisa wakes up beside Xavier in her East Village apartment. It’s simple and beautiful and sad, and I was going through a major Nick Drake obsession at the time I started writing the book.
“Camera,” R.E.M.
Louisa is an aspiring photographer in New York, and although the lyrics of this song make almost no sense to me, the music still belongs in the soundtrack for that part of her life.
“A Strange Kind of Love,” Peter Murphy
I loved this song as a New Wave-y teenager, and it seems appropriate for teenaged Gabriel: intense, brooding, earnest, walking through the woods with his subversive art ideas.
“Love Is Stronger than Death,” The The
Maybe because I was obsessed with this song the summer I was eighteen, I find myself giving it to Gabriel the summer that he’s eighteen. It’s another intense, earnest, walking-through-the-woods song, but also an optimistic one, about faith in love’s permanence and life’s regeneration. It seems to comment on Gabriel’s artwork, which is about the earth’s resilience after extinction and catastrophe, and also on Louisa’s disbelief that the feelings she shared with her former lover Xavier could really have vanished—or that he, himself, could be gone. From the song: “In our lives we hunger for those we cannot touch. All the thoughts unuttered and all the feelings unexpressed play upon our hearts like the mist upon our breath. But, awoken by grief, our spirits speak: ‘How could you believe that the life within the seed, that grew arms that reached, and a heart that beat, and lips that smiled, and eyes that cried, could ever die?’”
Lauren Acampora is the author of The Wonder Garden, winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a finalist for the New England Book Award; and The Paper Wasp, longlisted for The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. She is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has appeared Paris Review, Guernica, The New York Times Book Review, and LitHub, among other places. She lives in Westchester County, New York with her husband, artist Thomas Doyle, and their daughter.
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