Liz Riggs' Lo Fi

Nostalgia is a dreamy drug. So is music.

To my knowledge, there is only one problem with music. Well, two, if you count the power of earworms, the fact that even bad songs can get stuck in your head. Okay then, three: the simple fact that once you’ve heard a song you love for the first time, you can never hear it for the very first time again. But the real problem—and this can fundamentally Fuck You, in my opinion—is the way a song or an album or a voice on the radio can fling you so authoritatively into the past. Songs are almost always slivers of souvenirs, recollections, and Nick’s are no different. Maybe this is why his voice, to me, always sounds so much like a memory.

— Liz Riggs, Lo Fi

This book review will contain personal stories. I won’t apologize. Blame the book!

Nostalgia is tricky. Writers utilize it for different purposes. F. Scott Fitzgerald was nostalgic. Laura Ingalls Wilder was too. Neither were nostalgic for the same thing or in the same way. Nostalgia can be conservative, looking backwards to a so-called simpler time. John Cheever’s short stories are filled with middle-aged men, mostly ex-jocks, who yearn for the glory days of yore, and need to show they’ve “still got it”. Cheever understood: nostalgia can poison the well. The only guarantee in this world is everything changes.

Liz Riggs’ debut novel Lo Fi lives at the complicated intersection of comedy, yearning, and nostalgia, a potent rare combination, one which I can feel almost instantly. A prickle on my skin. Lo Fi establishes its swoony vivid atmosphere so totally, it - like the excerpt above - “flings you … authoritatively into the past.”

My response to Lo Fi wasn’t cerebral, although I did have the wherewithal to admire Riggs’ writing, and re-read paragraphs merely to revel in them. But the book exerted a strong pull, dropping me into my wild child 20s when I cavorted through Chicago’s actor/improv-comedy scene, causing trouble, making messes and not caring, fucking around, getting my heart broken, playing with fire, acting in plays, crying myself to sleep, gulping down margaritas on a Tuesday night, wearing the same outfit two days in a row to my temp job (figure it out), answering phones in an advertising agency still hungover, tripping from rehearsal to late-night bacchanal and home again (or not) … I don’t wear rose-colored glasses but there was something beautifully sharp about living in the moment. It was like there was more oxygen in the air. Lo Fi made me ache! For all of it! (My friend Mitchell said once, “Listen, Sheila, nobody can ever say your youth was wasted on the young.”) I didn’t need a mid-life crisis. I went wild back then and I don’t regret it (except when I do).

That’s the thing with Lo Fi. I took it personally.

Alison Hunter, a recent transplant to Nashville, stamps hands and checks IDs at a music club called The Venue. She’s in her early 20s. Her social life is very busy.

She yearns for Nick, a guy she had a brief fling with in Michigan. Nick is the charismatic lead singer for the band Flirtation Device. (The fictional band names in Lo Fi are hilarious.) Nick is always on tour. Every time Alison thinks she’s moved past obsessing over him, he will text her, or write a song about her, or swoop into town for a gig, pulling her back into his arms. Alison can’t resist any of it.

A freckle on his upper lip, a memory of a rainy night in Ann Arbor, cheap beer and cheaper weed, the dim light of a Michigan alley. Nick’s hands in mine, the music still shimmering on the soundtrack of the memory. He steps back and tries to explain: he’s just in town for the day, his band had a song they needed to record. Nick—in my city, wandering around just miles away, without me even knowing it…

Allison has no ambition to be a singer or songwriter, although she tries to write songs. She is adjacent to successful musicians in a city centered on music so maybe it’s intimidating to even try. She played out once at an open mic and it was such a disaster she is haunted by it months later. Her writer’s block tugs at her sleeve, demanding to be addressed. But Nashville is so all-consuming, she barely has time to focus on goals or plans.

How did I actually feel, when I pulled into town? … Relief, I think—to have put several states between me and Nick, a geographic barrier I was foolish enough to think would serve as a buffer. Relief to be surrounded by so many people with so many dreams, or rather so many people with the same dream, but so many different talents? Or maybe I was just relieved by the noise, relieved to have music playing—from somewhere, by someone—all the time, every day, no matter what. Even if it wasn’t mine.

Riggs’ writing is so evocative. You can hear the music in the air.

Nick is not the only game in town (he’s barely in town, anyway). There’s also Julien, who stamps hands at the door beside her. They don’t flirt, not exactly, but he seems interested in her in a way Nick doesn’t. He’s curious about what kinds of songs she writes. They are overly aware of each other. She crushes on him but he keeps his distance.

—You’re so cagey.
—You think anyone who doesn’t talk all the time is cagey.
—I’m not cagey.
—Well, you talk all the time.
That seems like a joke, but when I search his face for a smile, he lifts the beer to his mouth. There’s a catch in my chest that I can’t quite control, an accidental inhalation of smoke.

You get to know the other Venue employees. Colt, the dissipated but beautiful drug-dealing barback, whom Alison hooks up with on occasion, even though she keeps promising Sloane, her roommate and bestie, she’ll stop. But …

Now I’m wet and I hate it. Fuck Colt and his pretty fucking face.

Eddie hangs around the Venue, pontificating about jazz and the Rolling Stones. Being annoyed by Eddie is a bonding agent for the Venue employees. Andy is the owner, seemingly the only actual adult in the room (even though he’s probably only 30 years old).

The book is peppered with playlists Alison makes for different moods and situations, and also paragraphs, separated from the narrative, where Alison lists all her Nashville-centric “failings”. Her faux pas.

Confusing John Hiatt with John Prine… Not knowing enough about Dolly Parton. Not worshipping Dolly Parton, patron saint of Nashville … Losing my capo … Saying I’ve heard of a band while not having any clue—any effing clue—who they are. Not recognizing a Merle Haggard song, an Emmylou Harris song, a Hank Williams song. Not being able to come up with my own melody for almost an entire year.

She careens around with Sloane, crushes on Julien, sleeps with Nick and Colt, and sometimes with bartenders and/or baristas (a rookie mistake. Don’t do it!) She’s happy to have no responsibility at The Venue: she doesn’t want to “be in charge” of anything. Even her own life.

The tone of the book works by stealth. It starts with first-person present-tense:

I stamp hands at the Venue, off Eighth.

Alison lets us tag along, she points things out to us. Sometimes there’s a collage, seemingly written in a stupor the morning after some debauched night:

Shots of Four Roses, a Miller High Life and then another. Esther floating in the back, like a ghost. Another shot, the room warm, the music on a reverb-saturated loop. A girl onstage, sing-screaming about getting sober while I drift blissfully away from any such condition.

But then suddenly, Riggs switches to past tense. And it knocked the wind out of me.

After a drive with Julien:

Things I missed: A pewter ring he wore on the middle finger of his right hand…Cheeks flushed peach when he got too warm, most nights at The Venue. His short, filed fingernails. Green eyes, sometimes, and then other times definitively hazel. The way he was always listening, waiting, showing a patience for others that I could only aspire to.

The brief slightly mysterious interaction with Julien is suddenly ablaze with poignancy: an older Alison is looking back at her youthful shenanigans with Julien, and realizing the things she missed. Details. Textures. What was really going on. Everyone is self-consumed in their 20s. It takes time to gain perspective, to achieve enough distance to see the details, the things you should treasure, the things you can (or can’t) afford to throw away.

“Things I missed.”

This is the key to Riggs’ effectiveness as a storyteller (besides her gift with words / dialogue / character development / atmosphere). Present-tense Alison becomes past-tense Alison, and the book shimmers with profundity and yearning, acceptance and loss. What would it be like if we didn’t miss things back then when it was happening? Can’t Alison slow down just a second and see Nick is not the one, Colt is just a distraction, Julien … well, Julien might end up being very very important … but not now … not yet … What would it be like if Past You could leap forward “authoritatively” into the future and get a glimpse of what it all will look like?

Of course we can’t do that. But a novelist like Liz Riggs can.

Getting personal. It’s not my fault.

What would be my list for “things I missed”? I am grateful for those years in Chicago, crazy as they were. I took things hard. I lacked resilience even then. My life was intense, but it was also so entertaining (my journals are evidence), and I was so consumed by it - I miss being consumed by my personal life! But what did I miss then?

With apologies for stealing the idea:

Things I missed: Miles’ husky-blue eyes as he squinted at me, deciding whether or not to reveal something personal about himself. The wooden benches we sat on at Lounge Ax every Monday night to see Pat McCurdy play. My first apartment in Chicago, a one-room dump, the sickly sweet smell of roach motels, the heavy clank of the old-fashioned elevator at the end of the hall. The fierce wind as I ran along the lake shore. Taking ecstasy for the first (and only) time at a party and being so confused as to why I didn’t feel bliss. I instead made a spectacle of myself, weeping for four hours. The next day I looked up “ecstasy” in the dictionary and saw the first entry: “state of overwhelming emotion”. Relief! There wasn’t anything WRONG with me. Thank God I fact-checked my ecstasy-taking experience! Late nights walking to the lit-up hot dog stand, with Wrigley Field looming above us like the UFO in Close Encounters.

Sheila. Go home and go to bed. Now.

Things I missed: Miles said, “I don’t have another you, you know,” squinting at me before he said it. I didn’t “get” what he was saying then. I was so into him I missed a lot. My fight-or-flight instinct was so out of control I would see him across the bar and pretend he wasn’t there. Even though he was there to see me. Mitchell would go over to talk to him: “Hey, what’s up?” Miles, deadpan, unbothered: “I’m waiting for Sheila to stop ignoring me. It takes her about half an hour.”

Things I missed: I was weird and high-strung and I ignored him when he was there to see me and he didn’t take this personally. So many others did. We were the same age, kids, essentially, but he, the wildest boy I ever met, gave me space and grace. It took me years, literally, to really get how rare and precious it was. I lived long enough to perceive the “things I missed” and I can reclaim them now.

My Chicago time lives in music. It’s not intellectual. The music “flings me authoritatively into the past.”

• Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes.

• Jellyfish’s album Spilt Milk.

• B-52’s “Tell It Like It T-I-S”.

• Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Life By the Drop.”

The response is kinesthetic. The opening strains of “Little Earthquakes” make me smell roach motels.

Enough about me.

Riggs’ writing feels free and spontaneous. It doesn’t FEEL written at all. It made me laugh out loud and I cried twice. Twice! The last line made me cry! Rare! It’s difficult to stick the landing, and Lo Fi’s final line was a culmination of the book’s yearnings and hopes, barely spoken out loud, but present. Our triumphs don’t have to be enormous. Growing up is not a straight line.

Lo Fi is a beautiful tribute to living the kind of life that prioritizes art, whatever art it might be. Music isn’t background noise. Music is everything. It is the soundtrack of our lives, touchstones, time-markers, Proust’s madeleine. A container for emotions and experiences. Lo Fi is a tribute to those who love music so passionately they organize their lives around it, they wait in line outside a club in the pouring rain, they hang on to their CD mixes made for them by a high school crush, they appreciate the lo-fi, the analog, they make space for their love of something other than personal goals and accomplishments.

Lo Fi is an extraordinary debut novel, so extraordinary it just forced me to talk about myself. I hope that’s a compliment. It’s meant as one.

Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints is a beloved book to me, detailing the rambling adventures of a girl in New Orleans, rolling from party to party with people she’s known her whole life. She perceives kindness and sweetness in the most unlikely people. She lives in the 20th century but she yearns for a life steeped in poetry and values like “honor” and “valor”. The book is very very funny. Until it’s not. In Lemann’s The Fiery Pantheon, the narrator is, again, obsessed with the past and old portraits and people keeping up old rituals/traditions. Lemann writes: “She had a nostalgia for a life she never lived.”

Lo Fi made me nostalgic for the life I HAVE lived. Nostalgia can easily slip into self-pity. Nostalgia can be a drug. It can put you into a state of bliss or it can make you weep for four hours. I had to look up “ecstasy” in the dictionary. I didn’t need to look up “nostalgia”. The origin of the word is a two-parter, which seems appropriate: “Homecoming”/”Return” and “Pain”.

You can’t have one without the other.

Time does not heal all wounds. But time changes how things look, and it happens while you’re not paying attention. It’s like one morning you wake up and realize, “Why on earth did I lose months of my life aching for that BOZO?”

E.M. Forster’s Howards End is one of the most nostalgic books ever written. Here’s my favorite paragraph:

Life’s very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I’ve got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged – well, one can’t do all these things at once, worse luck, because they’re so contradictory. It’s then that proportion comes in – to live by proportion. Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.

Consider yourself very lucky if you didn’t begin with proportion. Experience “the better things” fully. They aren’t forever. Life will get serious enough in time.

I am grateful to Lo Fi, and Liz Riggs, for giving me the space to consider my own “better things” and to revel in someone else’s.