“He caught me singing along to some garbage song. It was the year 2000 so you can take your pick of soulless hits—probably a boy band, or a teenage girl in a crop top, or a muscular man with restricted nasal airflow. I was waiting for a drink at a bar, spaced out; I didn’t realize I’d been singing until his smile floated into the periphery of my vision and I felt impaled by humiliation.”
That’s the opening paragraph of Deep Cuts, Holly Brickley’s impressive debut novel. With “some garbage song,” Brickley’s narrator Percy Marks grabbed my attention; she guaranteed it with “impaled by humiliation.”
In her self-portrait from a chronological distance, Percy celebrates a semi-misspent youth—all of its fiery enthusiasms and blind alleys, its dramas and earnestness, its lessons learned, misunderstandings, messiness, unbridled pleasures, and excesses. And, yes, humiliations.
In “Sara Smile,” the novel’s first chapter, Percy debates with Joe Morrow, the musician who befuddles her (for years to come, little does she know then), about the difference between a perfect song and a perfect track. She bonds with him too (“We kept talking and couldn’t stop,” she enthuses). Later, Percy relates her roommate’s orderliness (that she reacts to with “small acts of rebellion” that are “calibrated to satisfy an inner urge for chaos”) and, a few pages further when she listens to a song Joe wrote and performed, she’s gobsmacked: “I played it again,” Percy recollects, “It didn’t suck, which I recognized for the enormous miracle it was.”
Variously exultant, sorrowful, jealous, defeated, victorious, elated, ambitious, despondent, sarcastic, confounded, vain, confident, dream-filled, solipsistic, and self-deprecating, Percy’s not so much mercurial as young.
She’s finding herself, of course, and with Brickley putting words in Percy’s mouth— “I … opened the spigot on my opinions,” as she says—the tale of her evolution, in her words, the quest “to close this anxious semi-virginal chapter of my life and become a fully formed adult with the capacity to find her own purpose,” is a bright collection of bristling episodes and a clever delight. From Hope, BC originally and then educated at Berkeley and Columbia before she landed in Portland, Brickley has clearly put something of her own experiences into the novel. Readers can empathize with her wayward journey while applauding her talent to tell about it with such verve.
As her recollection unfolds, Percy traces her romantic life. There’s her on again, off again (and then really off again but briefly on again, and then…) relationship with Joe as well as a few others who must struggle with the shadow that Joe casts. With the “dark, murky well” just below the surface of their often rivalrous situationship, we’re led to understand its inherent folly. Still, the exact nature of the wasn’t-meant-to-be will bring a wry smile to anyone who’s been there, done that.
Percy’s career arc is both funny and unexpected. An aspiring music lyricist and producer (“I have no talent,” Percy admits, “just opinions about people who do”), she winds up in blog-journalism—where, in pieces like “No Doubt is Fucking Good,” she’s opinionated in front of a larger audience and is abrasive in ways that film bloggers seldom are.
“I think songs give me a window into a magical life…. Something bigger, or whatever, waiting out there,” Percy relates. Later, “starting over, alone again,” in New York City, Percy’s misadventures in Deep Cuts compare favourable with ’80 fiction like Bright Lights, Big City and Slave of New York: making it or to trying to, getting ahead, or trying to, while dreaming of the big time and knowing it might materialize right after the current moment of being a black-clad “young writer in her spartan New York phase.”
After “waitressing and trying to write” in 2003, Percy reunites with Joe and soon finds herself on a Greyhound heading home to Indiana. “[T]hirty grand deep at Columbia,” she rebounds in the novel’s brisk and amusing third part, SF/NTC/LA/MIA, as she remains a “proud dork of the music blogosphere’ while also having a job that pays that revolves around recruiting “‘trendsetters’” (the air quotes are Percy’s) for business clients eager to market emergent trends. It’s a quintessential sellout job and she knows it.
The “magical life” she’d once imagined as being graspable has receded as other realities have pushed themselves into her sight. Based on the novel, though, Brickley’s no cynic. Finding one’s footing, the novel suggests, isn’t impossible. It just takes more time and effort than expected.
Holly Brickley is originally from Hope, British Columbia. She studied English at UC Berkeley and received an MFA from Columbia University. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two daughters. Deep Cuts is her first novel.
Publisher: Doubleday Canada (February 25, 2025)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 288 pages
ISBN: 9780385699907
Brett Josef Grubisic resides on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he's currently at war with his sixth novel. Previous novels include The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck.
- Brett Josef Grubisichttps://miramichireader.ca/author/brett-josef-grubisic/
- Brett Josef Grubisichttps://miramichireader.ca/author/brett-josef-grubisic/
- Brett Josef Grubisichttps://miramichireader.ca/author/brett-josef-grubisic/
- Brett Josef Grubisichttps://miramichireader.ca/author/brett-josef-grubisic/
