HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

The Song Is You: A Novel by Arthur Phillips
Loading...

The Song Is You: A Novel (edition 2009)

by Arthur Phillips

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
4723751,941 (3.46)50
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
… (more)
Member:andrewa121
Title:The Song Is You: A Novel
Authors:Arthur Phillips
Info:Random House (2009), Kindle Edition, 272 pages
Collections:DC, Your library
Rating:
Tags:early reviewers

Work Information

The Song is You by Arthur Phillips

  1. 10
    High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (elenchus)
    elenchus: Similar taste in music by the protagonists, but a very different novel. Both very good.
Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

No current Talk conversations about this book.

» See also 50 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 39 (next | show all)
No, it's not a proper review (I leave that up to the experts), but more of an extended observation, which can perhaps be best illustrated with an example of Arthur Phillips' prose, with our protagonist Julian listening to his Walkman in the Manhattan twilight:

...and he had the sensation that he might never be so happy again as long as he lived. This quake of joy, inspiring and crippling, was longing, but longing for what? True love? A wife? Wealth? Music was not so specific as that. "Love" was in most of these potent songs, of course, but they — the music, the light, the season — implied more than this, because, treacherously, Julian was swelling only with longing for longing. He felt his nerves open and turn to the world like sunflowers on the beat, but this desire could not achieve release; his body strained forward, but independent of any goal, though he did not know it for many years to come, until he proved it.

Because years later, when he had captured all that — love, wife, home, success, child — still he longed, just the same, when he listened to those same songs, now on a portable CD player, easily repeated without the moodicidal interruption of rewinding (turning spindles wheezing as batteries failed). He felt it all again. He pressed Play and longed still.


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:

I alone have heard this lovely strain,
I alone have heard this glad refrain:
Must it be forever inside of me,
Why can't I let it go,
Why can't I let you know,
Why can't I let you know the song
My heart would sing?


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.
( )
  thewilyf | Dec 25, 2023 |
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. ( )
  jonbrammer | Jul 1, 2023 |
(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.' ( )
  jhowell | Dec 19, 2017 |
Hot Irish singer chick falls in love with a self absorbed commercial director who's grieving over the death of his son. Here's the twist (spoiler alert)-they never meet.
Love, loss, the importance of the Ipod playlist. Nick Hornby on steroids and too clever by half. ( )
  HenryKrinkle | Jul 23, 2014 |
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. ( )
  nosajeel | Jun 21, 2014 |
Showing 1-5 of 39 (next | show all)
no reviews | add a review
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
The Muses are virgins....Cupid, when sometimes asked by his mother Venus why he did not attach the Muses, used to reply that he found them so beautiful, so pure, so modest, bashful, and continually occupied...in the arrangement of music, that when he drew near them he unstrung his bow, closed his quiver, and put out his torch, since they made him shy and afraid of injuring them.
--Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 3:31
Ground control to Major Tom:
Commencing countdown, engines on.

-Lincoln-Mercury ad
And I keep hoping you are the same as me.
And I'll send you letters. . .

-the Sundays, "My Finest Hour"
I touched you at the soundcheck. . .
In my heart I begged, "Take me with you."

-the Smiths, "Paint a Vulgar Picture"
The number one I hope to reap
Depends upon the tears you weep, so cry!

-the Beautiful South, "Song for Whoever"
Dedication
For Jan, of course
First words
Julian Donahue's father was on a Billie Holiday record.
Quotations
A piece of music's conquest of you is not likely to occur the first time you hear it, though it is possible that the aptly named "hook" might barb your ear on its first pass.  More commonly, the assailant is slightly familiar and has leveraged that familiarity to gain access to the criss-crossed wiring of your interior life.  And then there is a possession, a mutual possession, for just as you take the song as part of you and your history, it is claiming dominion for itself, planting fluttering eighth notes in your heart. [51]
Julian tried music in the hope that it would restore some part of himself, some ability to desire someone or something.  He hoped that music might, at least, seep into cuts, smooth over a surface, be useful, pay him back for all his years of commitment to it. And music succeeded, a little, or was the coincidental soundtrack to some recovery that would have occurred in any case: Julian did, now and again, regain that sense of pleasant unfulfillment.  He replaced, for a few minutes at a time, his agony with a benign pop-music ache, admittedly adolescent but now oddly specific: he longed for Rachel, for his own wife, in a way he had never longed for her before, even when they had first met and she was not yet his. [77]
He couldn't even claim he'd failed to make a great film, as he had never tried.  He remembered wanting to make one.  He wished he still did, but he didn't.  He wished he were an artist, a great artist, but sometimes he also wished he was an astronaut. [82]
She was not "in despair"; despair had taken residence in her as a boarder who came and left according to his own whims, rather than the posted hours the landlady respectfully requested. [87]
Julian had decided not to sleep with his assistant because a CD told him not to. This, obviously, meant something else; his own brief therapy had succeeded at least that far.  ...  He told himself that the oddly affecting experience with Cait O'Dwyer really meant that he had a hunger not for the singer but, like his father always had, for live music, and what a wonder it was, a privilege, to live in this city of sound. [88-89]
Last words
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English

None

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.

Book description
Haiku summary

LibraryThing Early Reviewers Alum

Arthur Phillips's book The Song is You was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

LibraryThing Author

Arthur Phillips is a LibraryThing Author, an author who lists their personal library on LibraryThing.

profile page | author page

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (3.46)
0.5 1
1 6
1.5 2
2 12
2.5 5
3 30
3.5 16
4 41
4.5 8
5 17

Penguin Australia

An edition of this book was published by Penguin Australia.

» Publisher information page

Recorded Books

An edition of this book was published by Recorded Books.

» Publisher information page

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 203,187,618 books! | Top bar: Always visible