why tf does this book only have 3.74 stars on goodreads!?!?
i'm going to commit a crime over this
When I finished Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley the other night, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to write about it. That’s how overwhelmed with emotion I felt. I’m a person who gets paralyzed with delight. But I have to set that 3.74 abomination of a Goodreads rating straight. Time to start screaming.
But before I do, here are the deets on the story:
It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox, and Percy—who has no talent for music, just lots of opinions about it—can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night. Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice? Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.
Hilariously, weeks ago, I picked up a copy at P&P before putting it back, unsure. Did that blood-red cover mean it was going to be a tragic story, dark, gritty but not in a fun way? Or another literary novel teasing romance, only to swerve from it, withholding the pleasure of watching the characters have each other? I even Googled, there in the middle of the storeroom floor, “Is Deep Cuts a love story?”
The answers were weird and vague: something about it being complicated. Something about someone not really understanding the main characters’ relationship to each other. Idk wtf these readers were talking.
This is a fucking love story.
The plot hums to the tune of a classic 2000 romcom, hitting all the right beats but with surprising force and at unexpected angles. Some critic somewhere is holding this against it. A Novel Made For The Movies. But maybe you didn’t hear me. Deep Cuts doesn’t embody just any romcom era but the golden age of them. It’s a dorky Ashton Kutcher and grungy Amanda Peet groping each other, total strangers, in an airplane bathroom only to circle each other for years before surrendering to the obvious in A Lot Like Love. It’s a partygirl Cameron Diaz and a cool Christina Applegate hunting down a man they met at a club to ruin his wedding because Diaz wants him, climbing San Francisco’s suicidal hills in halter tops in The Sweetest Thing. It has shades of Before Sunrise in that the act of falling in love is really the act of conversation, in this case, about what the two main characters love most: music.
And the descriptions OF that music are just…fuck me!
“The Drummer bangs hard on the snare to kick it off—one, two, three, four, one. The Singer receives each snare hit like bullets to his torso, staggering, arms draping off an invisible crucifix. And then he sings.”
Or:
“with that melody and his warm voice and all the lush instrumentation sprouting up around it like wildflowers, a whole ecosystem of beauty.”
I’ve been in a reading slump for a year at least. Underwhelmed, disappointed, bored. But it’s also my fault! One curse of being a controlling woman/writer is, every time I read a book, I know exactly how I want it to be written, I know the story I want and rarely is the story that departs from this as satisfying to me. This is also the curse of rigid tastes, vivid and intense desires, a constantly daydreaming brain—I always have an idea, another path that could’ve been taken instead. In this way, I’m a writer who reads rather than a reader who writes.
When I stumble on a juicy premise, my mind draws up a map on how to deliver on it. Many times the actual novel takes a different route, drops me off at what I feel is the wrong destination—which is the novel’s right! Some might even argue its purpose! But it can disrupt the dream for me. It’s like, you told me we were going to Paris but now we’re going to fucking Busch Gardens?
Incredibly, Deep Cuts somehow scratches every narrative itch, makes every plot turn, lands every emotional beat that I want it to. It’s like my map and Brickley’s could be laid perfectly on top of each other’s.
To be clear, I didn’t know what was going to happen in the novel. I didn’t know if Percy and Joe were going to get together in the end. It often felt like they wouldn’t. The story kept me in suspense and also gave me what I wanted from it.
What makes this novel so good is that the scenes I knew would happen, I didn’t know how. For instance, once Percy and Joe have sex for the first time, I knew a fight had to happen right after, that’s the literary law of tension. But I didn’t know how fucked that fight would make me feel!!!!
Picture: Joe running off with another woman to his hotel room after having sex with Percy earlier that night. Picture: an ignorant Percy knocking on his door for the C.D with his new songs, the one he’s asked her to listen to. A giggling girl. A shouting Percy. Joe sliding his C.D under the door. Percy snapping it in half, sliding it back under, wondering aloud how much that girl would be giggling if she knew her favorite song of Joe’s wouldn’t exist if Percy hadn’t helped him rewrite it. Percy can’t sing or play music herself, she needs Joe for that. Joe is talented but is an undisciplined songwriter, he needs Percy. Picture: two friends, then, who know exactly which knife to use on each other.
I didn’t need to be a musician to know the stakes. Any artist understands the eroticism of artmaking. Creative collaboration draws from the same well. I’ve had creative soulmates before but I was never fucking or falling in love with them. Like, sit back and prepare to be blown apart. The power they’d have over me. Having a person all up in your art like that, the same one you’re pining over? Baby, are you in trouble.
This is the problem at the novel’s core: Percy and Joe can’t make music together and be together. Too messy, too painful. But they can’t choose just either one.
How could they write the song, “Bay Window,” about watching the Twin Towers collapse in Percy’s house, without that wretched longing? How could they, in a New York piano showroom, come up with this bridge for it: “She tries to kiss me as the sun goes down—I only give her my cheek. I promise friendship and we face the screen again—what a day to be so weak.”
Years later, Percy turns up to one of Joe’s shows in L.A, when a super fan recognizes her as the girl in the “Bay Window:”
“That is the best ‘fuck you’ in the history of ‘fuck yous.’ Like, okay, you don’t want to kiss me? I’m gonna make you sing about this mistake for the rest of your life, dude. You’re going to be singing about this at the fucking Troubadour in a fucking decade.”
This is my understanding of the relationship between love and art. To occupy someone forever and ever and ever.
The writer Naomi Kanakia has lamented the way some literary novels promise to put a twist on genre but really just wind up undermining the reader’s trust by ignoring their genre expectations: the murder in the murder mystery doesn’t get solved. The love interests in the romance don’t fall in love. I also find this annoying UNLESS you’re going to give us something else, something better in its place, beyond a total let-down.
I’m so glad Brickley just gives us the romance because why fucking not? We don’t get this in real life. We don’t get the musician who sees directly into our souls. We don’t get the best friend after years of pining. We get the asshole with a hole in his sock who lives two hours away but doesn’t have a car.
The novel is filled with the rote disappointments of life, but it gives us our reward, which I see as a kindness.
I don’t know if I’m brave enough to declare Deep Cuts a perfect novel. The Great Gatsby is a perfect novel; I can argue that one easily, using a measured, literary logic. Deep Cuts is flawed. I rebuke its 3.75 stars on Goodreads but I can understand why, on some level, it has it, even though that level is beneath me.
But I do think that Deep Cuts is perfect for me. Like that person you’re entirely enamored with, it doesn’t matter that you know your friends aren’t swayed by their lopsided grin, their big ears, their one dimple, oddly placed.
Near the novel’s end, Joe and Percy are in a bar—the same setting that opens the novel—listening to the song, “Heartbeats” by Knife for the first time together:
“It’s a mysterious song about an intense romantic encounter, a true and astonishing episode of love—but something goes awry in the bridge, and all Dreijer is left with is a conviction that after this experience, divinity will never come from above. Not for her. Only earthly bodies, pressed so close they’re sharing heartbeats, could ever be divine…It was a song I understood only because of Joe, and now here he was.”
I love this review. My TBR is endless, but onto the pile it goes.