Review: Perfect Tunes by Emily Gould

Review by Miranda Cooper

Perfect Tunes
Emily Gould
Avid Reader Press, April 2020.
$26.00; 288pp.
ISBN: 978-1-50119-749-9

The premise of Emily Gould’s sophomore novel, Perfect Tunes—a twentysomething creative moves to New York in search of inspiration, love, and success—suggests that it belongs to the popular category of fiction that stretches from Jay McInerney’s seminal Bright Lights, Big City to HBO’s Girls, and includes such novels as Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Emma Straub’s Modern Lovers, and Gould’s own debut Friendship. This type of urban bildungsroman can be fresh and original in the right hands; it can also be hackneyed. The protagonist of Perfect Tunes, Laura, “wanted to do all kinds of clichéd things, and she was just self-aware enough to know they were clichés but still young enough to think that things would be different for her”; the same could be said for what Gould is doing with this novel. But things are indeed different for Gould, at least: when Laura becomes pregnant, Perfect Tunes diverges from the familiar tropes, becoming a subtle and complex meditation on motherhood and how it can throw all of our choices, and their costs, into sharp relief.

Laura is a Midwestern transplant fresh out of college and living in the East Village with her beautiful and charismatic best friend, Callie. She dreams of finding success as a musician, subsisting off of bagels and bodega breakfast sandwiches and writing “anti-folk” songs between shifts as a hostess at a bar where she is leered at by men, including her boss. (There are echoes of two wonderful novels by women, Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter and Lily King’s recent Writers and Lovers, here as well.) She moves through a world populated by elements that those who remember the culture of the nineties and early aughts will likely find delightful: she applies “glitter [makeup] that smelled like vanilla cake” and listens to “a Discman that predictably skipped during her favorite track.” These evocative details buoy Gould’s sometimes mundane prose, as do occasional simple but pitch-perfect observations about life, youth, and infatuation that sear with emotional accuracy.

On struggling to hide depression: “In every moment, she was trying to figure out how the real [her] would act, and then act that way.” On the aspirational phenomenon of clothes shopping: “Maybe a person who wore a shiny crushed-velvet baby-doll dress would be incapable of feeling sad or bored, or of being boring.” On the consuming nature of erotic infatuation: “She thought it might be possible to masturbate and then calm down, but that wasn’t the answer, somehow. Her thoughts of Dylan were too complexly real. It was distracting, and she actually had to force herself to think about something more abstract in order to come.”

This is the same sort of fleeting emotional incisiveness that made Lena Dunham’s Girls so effective, and as in Girls, as the story progresses, we witness the protagonist being forced to consider the costs of her choices as she, still an unattached twentysomething with youthful dreams and selfish impulses, prematurely becomes a mother. Yet neither of those stories is as simple as that. Becoming a mother does not magically rid Dunham’s Hannah of her selfishness, and for Laura, motherhood is just one more relationship with another person that determines her choices and for which she must sometimes sublimate them. Before motherhood, Laura’s path has largely been carved all along by Callie, who convinces her to go to the show where she meets her rockstar love interest, Dylan, which in turn shapes the rest of her life. Although it is Laura’s dream, not Callie’s, to become famous for her music, it is Callie who convinces her to cobble together a band (with Callie as a backup singer) so that they can play shows—which originates as a ploy to impress Dylan. It is Callie who comes up with the name for their band: the tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless all too appropriate “The Groupies.” As a teenage Callie comments while putting makeup on Laura, “I can make you look however I want you to look.” The close-third narration further emphasizes the significance of this observation by clarifying that “Laura wasn’t an idiot. She understood, even at fifteen, that this would always be a good friendship exactly to the extent that she wanted to be molded.”

Thus Laura’s malleability only becomes more poignant when this youthful chapter of Laura’s life abruptly ends in the wake of a tragic accident and an unexpected pregnancy. Her choices, previously guided by Callie, are now informed by her responsibilities as a mother. When her daughter Marie is a toddler and Laura takes Callie up on an offer to play a show in Philadelphia with The Groupies, she savors the experience, wanting “to linger in this moment of being separate and plausibly childless.” This sentiment is not undone, but simply complicated, when she returns to retrieve her daughter from the house of a daycare friend where she has stayed overnight and, in a heartbreaking moment, is confronted with an inconsolable Marie who cannot understand what she has done wrong to make her mother abandon her. Laura has felt the joys of “being separate,” and she also feels the pull of maternal responsibility; neither is diminished by the other.

With this embrace of the double-edged nature of motherhood, Gould succeeds in representing Laura’s situation evenhandedly. She suggests neither that Laura has sacrificed too much of her ambition to become a mother, nor that Laura’s choice is altruistic in a way that childless young women living selfish, frivolous lives simply cannot comprehend. Nor is it even a simplistic second-wave feminist declaration that a woman can have both a family and a career. In Perfect Tunes, motherhood is not a moralistic weapon to wield against the uninitiated childless masses, but rather a prism through which we might reconsider our choices and who we make them for.

Early in the novel, we learn that Laura’s favorite song—the one she listens to on the skipping Discman—is Joni Mitchell’s “Song for Sharon,” which Laura describes as “about being an adventurer and not worrying about conventional trappings of female life.” This is the dichotomy that the novel presents—and ultimately belies. Moreover, Laura goes on to explain, “in that song, someone suggests to the narrator (ostensibly Joni) that she should settle down and have children or do charity work, and Joni responds that the cure for her melancholy is actually to find herself “another lover.” For Laura, who has spent her life letting her choices be guided by various relationships, the question is not who that other lover is, but how she can find meaning on her own terms, whatever those may be.

Miranda Cooper is a NYC-based writer, editor, and literary translator. Her book reviews, essays, and cultural criticism have appeared in Kirkus Reviews, JTA, Jewish Currents, the Jewish Book Council, Tablet, and more. Her Yiddish poetry translations have been published by Jewish Currents and the Yiddish Book Center; one of her Yiddish fiction translations is forthcoming in Pakn Treger. She is currently an editor of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies and a 2020 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critic.