Icehouse

Icehouse, an Australian band, matters in the novel less as a background musical reference than as the source of a private vocabulary shared by the narrator and Susan Reynolds. A song they repeatedly play together seems to articulate what Susan has not yet fully said about Thom Wright, while the band’s music later accompanies their reunion after violence and returns in the narrator’s adult recollections as both an anthem of youth and a measure of what that youth cost.

Identity and Introduction

Susan and the narrator’s connection to Icehouse takes shape through listening together, not through a general allegiance to the band. In the senior parking lot, while she tells him that she has postponed the party she is organizing for Robert Mallory, an Icehouse song is playing in her car. The music opens a chain of remembered scenes: the narrator recalls how their shared taste had developed, and how songs the others did not care for became a private part of their friendship. Icehouse therefore enters the story at a moment when an apparently ordinary conversation about college plans gives way to a more unsettled account of desire and change.

The band’s first album supplies the particular song that becomes their shared reference. Susan had bought the cassette for its KROQ single, “We Can Get Together,” but another track on it became the song known only to her and the narrator. Debbie Schaffer, Thom, and Ryan Vaughn did not share that knowledge. The song’s significance rests partly on this small exclusion: it offers Susan and the narrator a coded point of recognition within a close social circle, a meaning they can invoke without explaining it to everyone else.

The Shared Song and Its Meaning

The narrator describes the song as a ballad about a girl outside an icehouse, dreaming of a new love while waiting for a man who needs another year. The lyrics and arrangement hold hope and menace together. A wavering, slightly robotic vocal sits behind a drum machine and minor-key synthesizer; the mood seems ominous until the music shifts into a warmer key and rises toward its final chorus. The song ends with the plain admission that there is no love inside the icehouse, then stops rather than fading away. Its sound makes romantic longing feel suspended between promised change and emotional coldness.

That tension gives the song a particular force when Susan tells the narrator about Thom’s prospective college visits back East. He understands that Thom’s father, Lionel Wright, hopes to draw his son closer by steering him toward Eastern colleges, while Susan’s own first choice is UCLA. Their conversation turns sullen. The narrator hears the Icehouse song as a form that gathers what Susan has only partly disclosed: her feelings for Thom have developed fissures, and she may be waiting for someone else. The music does not prove what she will do, but it gives the narrator a structure through which he reads her dissatisfaction and the possibility that her relationship with Thom will end.

The interpretation is not a clean romantic prophecy. The narrator briefly wonders whether he himself is the disruptive figure, then concludes that Robert is the more consequential presence. He also recognizes that Thom does not seem to be living the same emotional story. The song’s private meaning therefore sharpens his perception while preserving uncertainty: its girl, waiting lover, and devil can be mapped onto the people around Susan, but the mapping is his reading, not a certainty supplied by the music.

Music, Memory, and Aftermath

Icehouse’s role changes when the narrator visits Susan after the Canon Drive attack. Six days after the assault, she is recovering in bed, sedated on painkillers, with bandages across her chest and a serious injury visible beneath her robe. She and the narrator attempt to hug, wince, laugh, and then cry. They do not need to name everything the tears contain: the events involving Thom and Robert, their separate attacks, and the song playing in the room all converge in the scene. The band’s music, once a discreet sign of shared adolescent understanding, accompanies a moment when pain and loss are too extensive to be reduced to a private code.

During that visit, Susan shows the narrator a manila envelope and black-and-white photographs taken from a distance, apparently with a telephoto lens. They depict her with Robert at Las Casuelas in Palm Springs, at her grandparents’ house, in a pool, and near her BMW in the Buckley senior parking lot; other images show her going into Century Towers and standing alone on Gilley Field. Icehouse continues softly as the photographs make surveillance tangible. The scene does not identify their photographer, but it places the band’s intimate, shared sound beside images made by someone watching from concealment—a stark contrast between private listening and unseen observation.

In the narrator’s later account of writing about the past, Icehouse belongs to a recurring group of songs from that period, alongside “Vienna,” “Nowhere Girl,” and “Time for Me to Fly.” He listens to them for hours while working through old journals and school materials, sometimes drinking gin or taking Xanax or Ativan after a sequence of events leaves him depleted. What once sounded like hope, metamorphosis, and departure now also carries desire, rejection, and escape. The music does not close the distance between past and present; repeated listening makes the old emotional landscape audible again.

Narrative Significance

Icehouse connects the novel’s treatment of intimacy to its concern with interpretation. The narrator and Susan turn a song into a shared signal, and he then uses its lyrics and atmosphere to narrate the change he senses in her relationship with Thom. That act is revealing but fallible: the song helps him organize what is not yet spoken, while his reading of its figures cannot establish another person’s motives with certainty. Music becomes both a language for approaching hidden feeling and a reminder that feeling resists definitive explanation.

The song’s movement from ominousness to warmth, and its abrupt ending rather than a fade, also echoes the narrator’s retrospective unease. At seventeen he hears possibility in its longing; in adulthood he hears the same songs as evidence of a childhood he may not have left behind. Icehouse thus marks several different kinds of closeness: the adolescent bond encoded between Susan and the narrator, the painful intimacy of their hospital-room reunion, and the adult narrator’s repeated return to sounds that preserve both hope and dread. Its significance lies not in solving the story’s uncertainties, but in making their emotional afterlife audible.