FALL SPOTLIGHT: LAURA WARRELL

Rachael Warecki

Laura Warrell’s first novel, Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm (Pantheon, Sept. 20), follows jazz trumpeter Cyrus “Circus” Palmer as he turns 40 and reckons with a pregnant lover, a teenage daughter, and an assortment of other women “who are dazzled, confounded, exasperated, or obsessed with him,” as our starred review says, calling the book “a captivating modern romance evoking love, loss, recovery, and redemption.” Warrell answered our questions by email. Do you listen to music while you’re writing? Absolutely! Usually, I can’t listen to music with lyrics, and when I listen to jazz I get caught up in the intricacies of the sound, so my playlists include lots of downtempo music and acid jazz, which I like because many of the tunes follow a groove that keeps the creative juices flowing but doesn’t distract me.

For Sweet, Soft, I had playlists for each character, so when I worked on an individual chapter, I’d listen to those songs to get into that character’s headspace. Sometimes the lists were made up of music I thought the characters would like. For instance, Pia, Circus’ ex-wife, likes The Cranberries, Jewel, and other ’90s-era female crooners. Other times, I listened to music that, to my mind, “sounded” like the characters.

What kind of research did you do for Sweet, Soft? Are you a musician yourself? One of my regrets is not taking my piano lessons more seriously. (My mother was right!) I know my way around the keys, but I’m by no means a musician, so I wanted to unlock what I see as the mystery of the musician’s creative process. How does the muse come to musicians? What’s happening inside of them as they compose and play? What do the instruments feel like in their hands? How are they able to translate whatever they’re feeling or thinking into a language the rest of us can experience on a deeply visceral level?

My primary sources were books by authors who spoke directly to jazz musicians, like Coltrane or Armstrong. I also talked to the musicians in my own life. For instance, a friend of mine is a drummer, and I watched him play one day and kept stopping him to ask questions: What words would you use to describe the sound of the snare, what are you thinking about as you play, are you hearing the other instruments accompanying you in your head?

What books were formative for you when you were young? As a teenager, I went through simultaneous phases with Toni Morrison and Jack Kerouac, which might sound strange but which I think makes sense. What I loved about both of them, and my love for Morrison endures, was the musicality of their prose, the diction, the abstraction grounded

in the concrete. I found both of them to be poets as well as superb storytellers, and I aspired to their greatness.

What book do you absolutely love that is not as well-known as it deserves to be? Rather than a specific book, I have a writer for whom I’d love to go to bat. I discovered Javier Marías when I was living in Spain. His work is incredibly dense and profoundly intellectual— intimidatingly so—but he’s a master storyteller who’s able to weave tantalizingly bizarre plots with deeper meditations on the human experience. Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is a great place to start. It’s about a man who hopes to start an affair with a woman, but when he goes to her house, she dies in his arms. For the first 40 or so pages, we watch him experience this bizarre, heavy situation, which is a long time to linger in one moment. This is what makes Marías so amazing to me; those 40 pages are riveting.

Interview by Laurie Muchnick

But here, in a population of 60 million, there must be some.” McEwan is fond of having his characters guess wrongly about what’s to come: A detective scoffs at forensics based on genetics (“Fashionable rubbish”), while Roland nurses a “theory that the Chernobyl disaster would mark the beginning of the end for nuclear weapons.” Well along his path, though, Roland comes to realize a point learned in childhood but forgotten: “Nothing is ever as you imagine it.” True, but McEwan’s imagination delivers plenty of family secrets and reflects on “so many lessons unlearned” in a world that’s clearly wobbling off its axis.

A richly observed story that spans decades to recount lives of sometimes-noisy desperation.

THE BETRAYED

Melvin, Reine Arcache Europa Editions (464 pp.) $28.00 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-1-60945-773-0

Violence and chicanery, love and survival, poverty and careless opulence: Everything’s in play in Melvin’s sprawling family saga set in the Philippines—her U.S. debut. Lali and Pilar—two daughters of a political dissident who, with his family, fled their homeland for California—have fundamentally different temperaments. Outgoing Lali seeks attention and experience, while the more reserved Pilar is devoted to her family’s honor and preserving its legacy. More importantly, Lali is in a relationship with Arturo, the godson of an authoritarian strongman, their father’s rival, who shares characteristics with former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. After the girls’ father is assassinated, Arturo whisks the family to Manila and the safety that will be afforded to them as part of his family. Lali (now married to Arturo), Pilar, and their mother return to a fraught political situation, and their private lives become enmeshed in a political web of shifting alliances and byzantine dealmaking. When Lali becomes pregnant, subtle shifts occur in the balance of power (emotional and sexual) between the sisters, and both young women embark on paths unimaginable to them earlier. Grounded in the turmoil of recent political, military, and economic life in the Philippines, Melvin’s characters grapple with moral dilemmas that grow increasingly complex as their story unfolds. Themes of poverty, exploitation of women, and inhumane wartime brutality underlie the narrative, which unfolds against a backdrop of scenic beauty and rural poverty. Melvin’s storyline mines recent (and not-so-recent) Philippine history and is delivered with a healthy dose of drama, conveying a milieu where superstition and folklore can be as controlling as the gaze of television cameras. Peppered with moments of cinematic violence, the account of a family in flux also challenges readers to determine how everything changed in the family’s dynamics. As the girls’ father once observed, life is determined by a series of subtle, perhaps imperceptible ruptures that can have enormous consequences.