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Loading... The Song Is You: A Novel (edition 2009)by Arthur Phillips
Work InformationThe Song is You by Arthur Phillips
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I thought that this would be a Nick Hornby-esque meditation on music and relationships by someone who actually likes music, but here we have only a perfunctory taste of what the music mentioned in this book actually sounds like. We are presented with a live recording of Billie Holiday singing "I Cover the Waterfront", and the narrator's father's obsession with the song and memories associated with it, to show us how music and love are entwined with obsession. Or something. None of it is very convincing, especially the fact that the narrator, Julian Donahue, and an up-and-coming rock singer, Cait O'Dwyer, have a very strange and compulsive relationship based on nothing more on some drawings Julian left for Cait on some bar coasters. The lyrics to Cait's songs are not very good, and Julian seems to listen to nothing else on his iPod, which leaves his love of music in question. Also, no spoilers, but our hero Julian also turns out to be a weird, selfish dick in the end. I don't recommend this one. Cheers. (52) I can't quite figure out how I feel about this author. On the one hand, I loved 'The Egyptologist' and the other one about King Arthur and the forgery the name of which escapes me. But I disliked 'Prague' and I almost disliked this one, but it was finally saved for me when I sat down and read a big chunk in one sitting. I am so glad it ended the way it did and there were parts that were lovely, but parts that were so self-conscious and overwritten. Julian is a middle-age man separated from his wife and stalking a young rock-star. Though it seems he has actually made a connection with her and is almost serving as her muse and mentor. He becomes obsessed with her at the expense of attending to his own life. His own life, in particular, his parents and his marriage and child were much more poignant than the rock star bit. The book was at its best delving into the minutiae of his parents courtship and life. I loved the Billie Holliday parts with the old scratchy recordings in which he could hear his father and then his mother's voices. I love how those kind of things from a life before you can be so haunting. The book was at its worst when the protagonist was whining about the fictional rock star Cait. Her life and faux music was tiresome and that part of the book felt pretentious. I dunno - I almost think the novel would have been more powerful without her even though their weird courtship was the central plot. So mixed feelings - Phillips can write, but I think he does better with irony and clever fantastic plots than with these angsty male romances like this one and 'Prague.' I think this is Arthur Phillips best novel (although I haven't read Prague). It is a perfectly written and plotted story about middle-aged man obsessed with a younger singer, who also appears obsessed with him. But they keep passing it in the most glancing of manners. Reading it through the lens of the unreliable narrators in Phillips' earlier books made it more interesting. no reviews | add a review
AwardsDistinctions
Fiction.
Literature.
Romance.
HTML:BONUS: This edition contains a The Song Is You discussion guide and excerpts from Arthur Phillips's The Tragedy of Arthur, Prague, The Egyptologist, and Angelica. Each song on Julian??s iPod, ??that greatest of all human inventions,? is a touchstone. There are songs for the girls from when he was single, there??s the one for the day he met his wife-to-be, there??s one for the day his son was born. But when Julian??s family falls apart, even music loses its hold on him. Until one snowy night in Brooklyn, when his life??s soundtrack??and life itself??start to play again. Julian stumbles into a bar and sees Cait O??Dwyer, a flame-haired Irish rock singer, performing with her band, and a strange and unlikely love affair is ignited. Over the next few months, Julian and Cait??s passion plays out, though they never meet. What follows is a heartbreaking dark comedy, the tenderest of love stories, and a perfectly obse No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumArthur Phillips's book The Song is You was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Penguin AustraliaAn edition of this book was published by Penguin Australia. Recorded BooksAn edition of this book was published by Recorded Books. |
It's eloquent stuff, yes, all this aching, the blunt and concise beauty of a phrase like "this quake of joy." And yes, there are small gems like these scattered throughout the novel. But see, it's that word "moodicidal" that's, well, moodicidal. All this rapture, then a tiny thud, as if our appealingly lovelorn but not completely sympathetic protagonist -- the sort of person who would craft a word like "moodicidal" as a form of emotional self-defense, if that makes any sense -- had insinuated himself into the narration. A private grief made more palatable, perhaps, pulled to the surface, manifested and masquerading as verbal artifice. Because after all, the emotional core of The Song Is You is loss (the death of a child, a divorce), its depths momentarily excavated, dragged up to the light, by the fortuitous turn of the iPod's click wheel.
The thing is -- and this is where my disappointment with the novel lies -- The Song Is You is not really about music itself. Music is the milieu, sure -- rehearsal rooms, bars, groupies, message boards, drummers storming off in a fit, the privations of a tour. That is, it's not about music's capacity to transport, though it's actually music's transcendent power that Phillips beautifully captures in the lovely story (about his father and Billie Holiday) that bookends the novel -- the prologue, in fact, was what convinced me to buy the book in the first place -- but the rest of the novel's events simply pale in comparison.
The novel's narrative of pursuit seems to undercut the sublime quality of the prologue. Its cleverness as a whole -- one might cite "moodicidal" again, at this juncture -- deflates. There's this tension throughout that Phillips balances nimbly: is it a story about stalker and stalked, hunter and quarry... or a raging, unrequited love, of sorts? Well, it's both, kind of -- though not in such predatory terms. Think of the novel's proceedings as a more benign, albeit uncomfortable, pursuit. It's part-Chungking Express (a very good thing), part-Amelie (a not so good thing); these cinematic comparisons are apt, as what fuels the narrative -– a series of missed connections, as it were, between Julian and a singer -– is similarly about physical intimacy deferred. As another American songwriter (Tom Waits) once said, "The obsession's in the chasin' and not the apprehendin' / The pursuit, you see, and never the arrest."
The novel doesn't quite fulfill the promise that the Oscar Hammerstein III song of the title refers to:
What drives the singer crazy -- and I will always have Frank Sinatra in my head when I think of the song -- isn't how his love-object is the physical embodiment of the music, but (again) his longing that must be kept hidden and silent, kept only to himself. Music does not work in the same way that it functions in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, for instance, where the main character's musical obsessions and mix tapes are substitutes for his inability to communicate.
In contrast, Phillips' characters are studiously hyperarticulate, and music, in its general sense, is merely pushed to the background. Perhaps a movie version, paradoxically enough -- freed from the written word and forced to rely on the visual and aural -- will pare the events down to something closer to a musical essence.
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