SwR Presents: A Soundtrack for City of Margins
music
By Elizabeth Nelson
William Boyle’s wondrous new novel City of Margins is a tight knot of lives wound in ways both violent and romantic. Its worldview, as in much of Boyle’s work, is informed by the deafening din of modernity and the fated realities of Greek tragedy. Nearly all of the characters in City of Margins are defined by decisions they didn’t make—forced to live with the haunted aftermath of acts perpetrated by others, eager to make a human connection in a context where the desire for love and understanding is thwarted by their cruel surroundings.
Like other Boyle novels, City of Margins takes place in a very specific region of Brooklyn—the dense and unknowable outskirts near the Atlantic that connect the boroughs to the more prosperous neighborhoods of the North Shore of Long Island, where I grew up. I wouldn’t claim to have known the sort of characters that populate City of Margins, but I know the vibe. Provincial, macho, deeply Italian. This was my grandmother’s childhood, and my mother’s, and I grew up in a small home with both of them. Boyle’s feel for that argot is remarkably precise. I hear his characters talk, and I conjure a genially shouty dinner over sausage and peppers or Sunday gravy. There is also a great deal of music in City of Margins, skillfully threaded through its chapters as indicators of its characters’ sundry mindsets, subtle hints at what their futures might hold or their pasts might imply. When Southwest Review asked me to assemble a playlist to go along with City of Margins, I was reluctant, thinking it might be impossible to improve on the curated set already included in the novel. But I persevered anyway, because that’s what Italian girls do. At least where I come from.
“Italian Girls” by Rod Stewart
A little on the nose, right? Nevertheless, Rod’s 1972 homage to the ladies of Italia rings true for a story that makes only too real the established archetypes of the irresistible siren, the strict but doting homemaker and the scolding Catholic firebrand. Boyle’s central insight is recognizing that these are not truly separate figures but instead non-integrated parts of a whole. Rod’s killer tune—backed by what is essentially The Faces—is appropriately baffled by the challenge: “Oh the Italian girls sometimes hold their religious habits / In front of your eyes / Just to get you tied.” Well, yeah.
“In The Neighborhood” by Tom Waits
Every provincial neighborhood is ruled by its own idioms and rituals, functionally incomprehensible to even the closest town over. Maybe that idea has fallen away in most of America as modern capitalism’s great levelings proceed inexorably, but I can report that it is still true on Long Island. City of Margins occurs during the early 1990s, a time when street-level innuendo was the internet. Some of it is true, and some of it is bullshit. Same as it ever was. Anyway, Waits’s 1983 anthem knows the score: “Well, Friday’s a funeral and Saturday’s a bride / Sey’s got a pistol on the register side / And the goddamn delivery trucks, they make too much noise . . .”
“Police on My Back” by The Equals
Most are familiar with The Clash’s incendiary version from Sandinista!! And there is nothing wrong with that, but this original rendition from 1968 by the Eddie Grant–fronted The Equals is the more appropriate take for City of Margins, a version which de-emphasizes the gunfighter implications of Joe Strummer and company in favor of something more badgered and bewildered. What does following the law even mean when the lawmen themselves are criminals? City of Margins is filled with corrupt cops and suggests many parallels between the impulses that drive both law enforcement and criminal behavior. Should you encounter either, the best idea is to run.
“Brooklyn Roads” by Neil Diamond
Nostalgia is a Schedule One Controlled Substance, often mainlined recklessly by New York Italians. In City of Margins, characters are constantly relitigating the past, trying to improve it, never willing to forget. It could scarcely be a worse strategy for thriving in our modern times, but it’s one I profoundly understand. Neil Diamond’s “Brooklyn Roads” casts this into bold relief: “If I close my eyes / I can almost hear my mother / Callin’, ‘Neil, go find your brother. / Daddy’s home, and it’s time for supper.’” It’s an idealized version of post-war urban American life rivaling the best of Merle Haggard’s utopian western picaresques. But to the characters in City of Margins it all seems very real.
“Miss Misery” by Nazareth
Of all of the places I have ever visited overseas, nowhere has felt more at home than in Scotland. I’ve often opined that Scotland is the Long Island of the UK, and I mean that as a compliment. Working-class, proud, pugnacious, redolent of cigarettes and booze, and just proximate enough to the urbane sophistication of a major metropolis to feel simultaneously reverentially aspirational and suitably pissed off. The girls in Glasgow have big hairdos and nails, and the guys wear strong cologne and their shirts unbuttoned just a little too far. And my gawd, those ACCENTS. In any event, one of the characters in City of Margins is a huge Jesus and Mary Chain fan—a wonderful Scottish indie band in their own right—but I think that the majority of the denizens of William Boyle’s universe would be fans of the harder side of Scottish music: ’70s balls-out, classic rock rippers Nazareth. So much so that they would own multiple copies of Hair of the Dog and be blasting this choice cut constantly.
“I Just Want to See His Face” by The Rolling Stones
Boyle’s Brooklyn is a ghost world of abandoned spiritual dreams that nevertheless take on the character of a boardwalk gypsy’s impenetrable provocations. In the end, just about everyone in City of Margins is struggling through multiple tragedies and somehow grasping at the thin tissue of the faith they were brought up in. As a lapsed Catholic, I know the feeling, and no one ever put it better than The Stones on this track: “You don’t want to walk and talk about Jesus. / You just want to see his face.”
“Return to Me” by Dean Martin
Sinatra is the avatar, but to those who actually walked the walk, Dino is the real deal. His 1958 reading of the Carmen Lombardo–penned classic anticipates everything from the Everly Brothers to Elvis himself and conjures in eerie terms the spooky Italian-Catholic preoccupation with ghosts. The past is more prized than the future, and the culmination of City of Margins both embraces and bucks this trend, offering an optimistic vision of imperfect love. Ardor is a triviality. Real love requires proof of concept. Should I stay or should I go? From the Belt Parkway to the LIE: hurry home, hurry home, won’t you please?
“The Gun” by Lou Reed
At a pivotal point in City Of Margins, a key character comes into possession of a firearm. She imagines it’s for her safety, but as is so often the case in such scenarios, it is ultimately the instrument of her own demise. Lou Reed is famously a New York City Man, but he didn’t start out that way. He was initially a creature of the post-WWII Long Island suburbs, where the gangs and the danger still existed but were more diffuse than in Brooklyn proper. This 1982 track from The Blue Mask, while it evokes the powerful feeling of owning a weapon, insists that the most powerful act is setting the weapon aside. Robert Quine’s guitar is the moral conscience to the unhinged id of Lou’s lyrics.
“Personality Crisis” by The New York Dolls
As a bridge-and-tunnel girl who spent her teen years riding the LIRR to punk shows in Manhattan, I can speak from experience of the real-time personality crisis that New York represents as a complicated social and economic ecosystem. The distance between the hardscrabble outskirts of Queens and Staten Island and the fashion-forward sophistication of the East Village and Tribeca is only five miles or ten minutes on the train, but the psychological distance may as well stretch as far as the endless cold Atlantic. City of Margins is full of characters who have never left the neighborhood, and others who want to leave at any cost. The Dolls, with their libertine attitudes and unforgettable songs, were once outer-borough kids who found their footing and changed the station. A patron saint to any Catholic boy or girl that ever got out before it was too late.
“Mission Rock Resort” by Mark Eitzel
Arguably Mark Eitzel’s most fully realized masterpiece, “Mission Rock Resort” recounts the end of an affair with a lover who is gradually killing themselves with hard drugs and can barely stay awake for the planes taking off over the Oakland Skyline. City of Margins is a story about a different kind of addiction—the need to be bigger, to exist in some other way. The desire to actualize your best self and find out about the world outside the slate-gray walls of the occupied city. And then you are brought low and still delivering for the small-time gangster or winding up short of your simple goal of two weeks’ vacation. “Our talk is useless,” Eitzel muses on the final refrain before boring in on the truth of the matter: “Nothing changes. Not ever.”
Elizabeth Nelson is a songwriter, journalist, television writer, and civil servant in the field of education policy. Her writing appears in the Oxford American, the Washington Post, NPR, The Ringer, and Lawyers, Guns & Money. She fronts the Paranoid Style, a D.C.-based garage-punk band once described by Robert Christgau as “better than anybody else except Sleater-Kinney.”
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