Percy Marks knows music. She might be a socially inept and romantically stunted college junior with few friends, but she can explain exactly what makes Hall & Oates’ 1975 hit, “Sara Smile,” “a perfect track, a perfect recording.” (It’s all in Daryl Hall’s “riffing,” she argues.) It’s that pop music fluency that draws her into conversation one night with Joe Morrow, a fellow student and aspiring musician. The pair have an instant connection, and their resulting entanglement plays out, in all its ups and downs, throughout the rest of Holly Brickley’s stylish and shimmering debut novel, DEEP CUTS.

Joe asks Percy for feedback on a song he’s working on, and she obliges. She doesn’t hold back in her criticism, bluntly informing him over IM that elements of the composition are both “super generic” and “yet also overwritten.” Joe doesn’t mind. Instead, he thrives off of her candid comments. Soon, he’s relying on Percy to guide him as he writes. At first, Percy relishes her role as Joe’s informal songwriting partner. Her position as his “musical sidekick” gives her “great power without risk or accountability.” That kind of shadowy background role is exactly what the awkward and insecure Percy wants when she and Joe first become friends as undergrads in the early 2000s.

"...[a] stylish and shimmering debut novel... Brickley has set herself a challenge in attempting to capture the emotional weight that music can carry, especially when you’re young. But she mostly succeeds in bringing the sounds to life on the page..."

But as Percy and Joe grow older, and his band, Caroline, enjoys some small success, things get more complicated. As she struggles to build a career as a fledgling music writer, he crisscrosses the U.S. and Europe, enjoying life as an indie rock star, groupies included. Percy begins to wonder if continuing to be Joe’s creative sounding board is serving her or holding her back. But severing their connection completely is impossible, particularly because of the pair’s romantic attraction to each other, which waxes and wanes over the roughly decade-spanning novel.

DEEP CUTS is firmly situated in a time and place that now feels almost impossibly distant --- a mostly pre-social media era when small-time music bloggers could still be tastemakers and the word influencer did not yet exist. Those who remember that time (or who just wish they did) will appreciate Brickley’s trip through the hipster milieu of the early aughts, soundtracked by Pitchfork-approved bands like Interpol, LCD Soundsystem and Neutral Milk Hotel, and fueled by PBR and Sparks. But DEEP CUTS isn’t just a nostalgia trip for aging millennials. It’s also a sensitive meditation on the nature of creativity, the power and pitfalls of collaboration, and the difficulty of claiming your artistic voice. “I wouldn’t even be able to speak into that microphone,” Percy thinks as she watches Joe perform. “My voice would crack and dissolve on a single hello.”

Brickley has set herself a challenge in attempting to capture the emotional weight that music can carry, especially when you’re young. But she mostly succeeds in bringing the sounds to life on the page, whether it’s an early No Doubt track where Gwen Stefani has “the voice of an ambulance siren” or Radiohead’s “Let Down,” which is “a perfect exorcism of one’s own misery.” Throughout, Percy narrates her life through song. When she and Joe share a cigarette while listening to Yo La Tengo’s “Last Days of Disco,” it “felt like the whole porch was swallowed in the atmosphere of the song, teetering and shuffling brush-drumming and bending guitar notes.” You don’t need to know the track to get the vibe. (There is a Spotify playlist to accompany the book for those who want to further immerse themselves in Percy’s musical taste.)

As much as DEEP CUTS is about music, it’s also about growing up and learning to know and accept yourself. Percy’s journey draws to a close in the wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis, just as her aimless 20s are also coming to an end. This Percy is far different from the young woman whose vast musical knowledge was a source of both shame and pride. (“I’m mostly annoying when I talk about music,” she tells Joe’s then-girlfriend, Zoe, early on. “But that’s also when I’m at my best, so.”) She is more confident and less willing to slide into the background of someone else’s story. She wants connection, friendship, happiness, and a place to settle down and feel at home. “I would be ready. I would be cool,” she tells herself as she prepares to meet Joe after a long period of silence between them. “No need to be weird anymore; we’re too old, and the world is too fragile.”