The Song is You

Beautiful, joyful (yet terribly sad), haunting, frustrating. That's how I'd describe The Song is You in ten words or less.

Now for more words.

Reading it, I often found myself in an intense state of panic. The action itself crawls, and yet the future of the story constantly feels frighteningly urgent. Arthur Phillips completely ignores the rule of "show, don't tell" by filling the vast majority of his story with exposition over action and dialogue, and yet it seems okay. Even necessary. Through so much rambling description and explanation, he is able to craft perhaps the most vivid characters I've ever read. Even the most minor of characters feel like real people. You can imagine what they smell like, how they walk and move, the sound of show more their voice (even the non-accented ones). And boy, can this guy craft some powerful suspense from the simplest situations.

BUT. I wanted more. That's my major gripe. It feels incomplete. And not cleverly or intentionally so. Rather, it feels slightly stunted and wanting. In a story about two hungry people circling each other, fantasizing about each other, building each other up to impossible heights doomed for mutual disappointment, perhaps it's only appropriate that the story does the same to the reader. Right?

If that is truly the feeling that Phillips is trying to evoke, crafting an emotion to match the flow of the narrative, forcing the reader into submission of the characters' sufferings, then I must say bravo. He succeeds. Still, what an awful feeling to evoke. How cruel to cause such a constant intake of breath and never give the reader a chance to exhale, choosing instead to let them linger in the discomfort of a held breath.

The writing is wonderful. The story feels so unique, fresh, and creative while focusing on such classical themes that could very well be cliches in the hands of a lesser author. Definitely one of the most intriguing books I've read in a very, very long time. And yet (without revealing any particular details) I sincerely will never forgive him for tying things up with -- figuratively as well as quite literally in the case of the protagonist's father -- a fart. I would've rather preferred to exhale my 250-page deep breath, and instead I was coughing. Great book though, truly. show less

Arthur Phillips uses music to tell a love story in his latest novel, The Song Is You. His main character is Julian Donahue, a middle-aged commercial director obsessed with his iPod and constantly analyzing his life through songs of his past. The song of first love, first kiss, first heartbreak--Julian's iPod is an album of memories that have left him imprisoned to the past.

Julian has a long history with music, taking after his father who can be heard requesting a song on a live recording of a Billie Holiday concert. But fast forward many years later, and Julian has separated from his wife after the sudden death of their two-year-old song. He's in a rut of pain and heartbreak, but everything changes the night Julian stumbles in a bar and show more hears the music of Cait O'Dwyer, an Irish [much younger] rock singer with flaming red hair and a personality to match. Voilà, a unique love story is born.

Phillips has crafted characters full of personality and quirks. Julian's older brother, Aidan, is a socially inept genius whose downfall came from a politically incorrect answer on Jeopardy; his wife, Rachel, is desperate to end their separation and speaks to Julian through subtle hints and clues that are often misinterpreted; Julian has trouble shifting from playboy to devoted husband, as his obsessions tend to win over self control. Metaphors are prevalent, both in the language and plot of the story, a feature of Phillips' writing that can at times have you begging for a concise description. Julian and Cait's relationship becomes a game shrouded in mystery and anticipation that keeps you interested in how it plays out. I got so caught up in the characters' next moves, that I had to stop and realize how obsessive and dark this plot had become. Phillips has a bigger picture in mind, though; this obsession as a form of escapism ultimately leads the characters through their problems and out of the past, and he successfully created a piece of work that perfectly illustrates the relationship between society and technology. show less

The central concept of a person experiencing personal grief in middle age and turning to art, in this case music, in some ways functions as a set piece, there to provide Phillips a forum for commenting on love, loss, and expectation. His prose and the way he captures interpersonal dynamics, emotion and sensation, lend the novel heft, not the action or past histories revealed as the plot unfolds.

At the same time, The Song Is You is not a character piece, in that the point does not seem to be understanding any character's personality or motives, or even to focus on the character's interpersonal relationships, so much as it is to examine the pragmatic influence of ideals on the protagonist's everyday life. The novel explores this theme by show more relating the challenge of relating directly to music, rather than to the musician or various other people involved in making that music. Not that one can't relate to the musicians, too, if the musicians are interesting to you, but the challenge is whether it's possible to relate to the music in itself, to interact with it, and if so, what that would be like. It seems to me that Phillips observes that it's strangely difficult to bring music as an abstraction into one's life without somehow damaging the music or your experience of it. This theme is for me the heart of the novel.

Phillips's protagonist, Julian Donahue, shares my general musical appreciation, both specific artists and the influences shaping his overall taste (1970s and 1980s popular music, 1940s jazz standards, and all that flows from those twin tributaries). I also recognise the connection Julian has to music, how specific songs connect and even narrate experiences, without this link being constrained to just one event or experience, necessarily. In this way, the leitmotif of music is more effective here than it is in Hornsby's High Fidelity, though I enjoyed that, too.

Phillips also has an understated way of weaving musical allusion and lyrical quotations into descriptions, and it is this talent that resonated with me. He does not resort to lists or name-dropping but integrates the story or character at hand to the music, to the extent there were several occasions I could not identify the reference but felt confident there was one. In one instance, Julian's father weaves a quote from a jazz standard into his dialogue [205], and Phillips doesn't call attention to it at all, just as it's likely Julian (at the time no older than 12) doesn't recognise it as a lyric. But we know his Dad would know it, and would use it in conversation in just that way.

I had hopes that Julian and the musician Cait would never meet, even as I enjoyed their distant communications: the novel unfolded in part as a modified epistolary narrative. My wish that the two would never meet was fed largely in recognition of Julian's thrill at discovering a musician, and then fantasizing about successfully influencing that musician in their work. Here is that romantic notion again, not boy-girl romanticism but the notion of ideals and how a person might concretely uphold and become involved in, even contribute to those ideals. The thrill of being recognised / acknowledged by the artist, and in not being a groupie but authentically contributing to those aspects of the artistry which were so impressive to the fan in the first place. The invasive stalker relationship between Julian and Cait is creepy, but it also came across as perhaps inevitable given a premise of (a) exploring the idea of a fan appreciating and also influencing an artist, while (b) delaying as long as possible if not outright preventing the artist and fan from ever actually meeting. For me, this was the core of the story as well as the musical leitmotif, and it led to some disturbing places between the characters in order for that theme to be explored.

The resolution is a bit overwrought and almost anticlimactic from the standpoint of plot, then. From the standpoint of Julian trying to connect to music beyond merely sitting in his head and hearing or thinking of it, though, the resolution seems reasonable. Julian and Cait interact on several levels: as musician-fan, artist-patron, celebrity-groupie, producer-consumer, artist-mentor, artist-colleague. It was apparent to me that Phillips was aware of the dual nature of Julian and Cait as a fairly standard romantic couple, on the one hand, and as an example of an artist (Cait) linked to someone appreciating her art (Julian), and then set out to address how the two perspectives would fit together. On one level, the results are disturbing: the obsession on the part of both characters for each other, and how they reach out to one another. On another level, the developments follow necessarily from one character's intent to to pursue the romantic notion of ideals being taken seriously, rather than merely as wishes or distractions.

After reading the novel, Phillips seems to comment that romanticism is always a bit twisted, perhaps perverted when brought out from the realm of internal experience. The price of admission.

Phillips references the better part of an entire album, (Cait's fictional album Servicing All The Blue Suits) plus her demo and various performances portrayed in the book, including song titles and track sequencing. He quotes liberally the lyrics of several songs, and if anything, the lyrics read better than many lyrics do when divorced from their musical accompaniment. I'm left wondering if the songs wholly exist. Not necessarily recorded, but as more than just the scraps needed to quote in the novel. Did Phillips write or co-write a full album of material? Did he commission someone else to do it? Did he borrow existing lyrics or poetry to create the album? If there literally is nothing more than what is quoted in the book, it's impressive that he leaves the impression there's an actual album he's describing, that he's not merely using stray bits of verse and adjectives in place of actual songs. show less

Music, like poetry, captures and magnifies emotions in a way that descriptive, neutral prose cannot. Nor can “real life” provide the background lyrics and sound that turn a mundane existence into a tale worthy of the silver screen. Enter the IPod. In this intelligent and poignant novel by multi-talented Arthur Phillips, the protagonist - 44-year-old Julian Donahue, turns a mid-life crisis into a rock concert movie not only by giving his life a constant soundtrack, but by pursuing one of the most affecting artists on his playlist of singers, a local Irish beauty (age 22) who fronts a rock band that often plays at a club near his home in Brooklyn.

Julian has had a painful existence of late. He and his wife have separated after a year show more of struggling, unsuccessfully, to survive the death of their two year old son Carlton. His libido is gone, his passion for life is waning, and he can’t imagine how he can get his life back on a positive track. And so he turns to the old familiar tracks he knows: he sets his IPod to shuffle, and taps into the longing expressed by the songs. Julian aches for a return to emotion in his own life, but doesn’t know where to find it, until he hears Cait O’Dwyer sing. He is convinced her songs speak only to him; that the lines she writes have gained “access to the criss-crossed wiring of [his] interior life.” The more he hears her and becomes affected by her music, the more he becomes obsessed by her:

"The dense terrine of feeling in Julian – regret, hope, sorrow, faltering ambition, longing – startles him. It could not be produced in such concentration and quantity without the voice, and so… he comes to crave the voice because it reveals the feelings he could not find in silence."

Cait’s guitarist Ian was also smitten with Cait from the moment he began to play music with her, but is afraid to tell her so. But he remembers that moment vividly: "That very first song ended, and they both knew: the sound had been a multiple of them both. And they knew. They sat in a long silence as the sound they had made traveled down the street, out to sea, up to distant stars. Only the low hum of his amp persisted, and he was afraid (as she looked at him and he considered leaping at her) that the pickup from his guitar would pick up his heartbeat and play it for her.”

Later, Ian comes to see Julian as a rival, even though Julian and Cait have never actually met. But that doesn’t mean they don’t communicate, and it is this communication and its poignant outcome that makes up the bulk of the story.

Discussion: There’s a lot to think about at the end: what makes attraction viable? How can you separate need from love, or should you even try? To what extent should we resign ourselves to our perceived fates, or should we “rage, rage, against the dying of the light”? And then there was my own personal reaction to the ending: was the reason I was so profoundly affected (sorry, can’t tell you in what way or it might spoil it for you!) because of my own personal history? I.e., was the reader in the text or would the text have that impact regardless of the reader?

Evaluation: I rarely get the reading experience I had here of a love story being a page-turning edge-of-my-seat kind of experience. And part of the love story was mine, as I fell for the author’s beautifully engineered phrases (e.g., in addition to the quotes given above, referring to face-to-face encounters as “archaic forms of human interaction” and testing the waters of a relationship as taking an “escargotically slow approach”). This is a wonderful book for reading and discussing in the company of a book club, or for reading alone in a room full of flickering candles, with a soundtrack from the moments of your life you most want to relive, when your life was full of passion, and hunger, and loving and loss. show less

I must say, I was rather pleased with The Song Is You. It's not that I didn't expect to enjoy this, because I did, but I also expected to feel like it was missing a small something. That's how I felt about Prague and The Egyptologist, both works that I enjoyed, but ultimately finished feeling a teensy bit dissatisfied (and also feeling like they went on just a touch too long). No matter what, though, I still really enjoy Phillips' writing style -- which is why I keep reading his stuff. When LibraryThing listed The Song Is You as an early reviewer's option for the monthly books they offer for free, I threw my hat into the ring and snagged a copy. (Oddly enough, the day I received it in the mail, my friend who gets free books via a show more literary site that he runs, also offered me a copy, which I passed along to another friend.)

I began reading this without the faintest idea of the plot, beyond a vague knowledge that it must have something to do with music and a relationship. The title supplied me with the music idea and the cover (featuring a young man and a young woman) suggested the relationship bit. That's it. So perhaps I shouldn't summarize the plot, but suggest that you, too, should take a chance on this and just read and fall into it. Perhaps, but I won't. Instead, I'll provide a hazy sketch, because really, the plot is a bit hazy, too -- in a good way. Our main character is named Julian and the book focuses on his relationship to music in his life, and his relationships with two other women. To a great degree, the novel portrays people whose relationship to music can often be seen as a means of pushing back on actual human interactions and how music can be more than just the background soundtrack. The novel starts with a scene involving Julian's father at a Billie Holiday concert. Sure, this was the concert where his future wife and mother of his children was seated beside him, but above all, the siren and her music meant so much that it seems to overpower even the events set into motion on that night. Julian is instilled with a great respect for music, raised by a widowed father alongside an older and antisocial brother. He marries, he has a child, that child tragically dies, and his marriage essentially ends, though the final divorce decree has not yet come down. And then Julian is introduced to a new siren, an Irish redhead whose fame is growing, and they become involved in an intricate dance of longing for connection.

The book jacket calls one's attention to the fact that Phillips is a writer for people who both think and feel. And we all know that "think" can often mean "overthink." This particular book is a beautiful portrayal of characters who perhaps aren't looking for romance and meaning, but once it becomes an option, they are hungry to have it, but constantly overthinking in their attempts to create something perfect and potentially lasting.

I shall certainly be recommending this novel to those who have previously enjoyed Phillips' work... and to those who were not perhaps won over, I shall urge them to give it another shot with this, because I think Phillips has really done something remarkable here. The novel shows incredible growth, away from the somewhat arrogant youth of Prague, and while there is a certain indulgence to the melancholy of romance here, the emotions feel real and true. An excellent work, and I shall continue reading whatever Phillips puts out next. show less

Arthur Phillips has for a while now been one of those writers I hadn't read anything from but I wanted to, when I'd gotten through a small percentage of the ocean of books I wanted to read. Without reading them, I already knew and was surprised at how diverse a writer Phillips is:

Prague: Western expatriates living in Budapest
The Egyptologist: a 1920's explorer seeking the tomb of an Egyptian king
Angelica: a Victorian ghost story told through four different perspectives

Now add to these The Song Is You: a 2009 tale about the power of music, the power music has over people, and the power people have over other people. On an October New York City day, Julian is listening to a favorite old song, trying to figure out what this feeling of show more longing is for. Years later, he still feels the same. He becomes a muse for Cait, an Irish singer on the rise. Julian's knowledge of music influences Cait, just as Cait's music itself influences Julian, though they are always just barely out of each others orbit.

There is no quicker way for a book to make its way into my heart than to involve my other love -- music. Knowing there will be musical references is enough to get me interested. I love that when Julian is trying to guess Cait's favorite musicians and bands, he lists a lot of MY favorites. However, the musical references started to taper off towards the second half of the book because of Julian's obsession with Cait and only Cait, which starts to get a little creepy. I realized at times that I hadn't taken a breath in a while due to the high tension of the characters, maybe I was expecting the worst in the end. This would not be a fairy tale ending. Julian and Cait would not find complete happiness. I started to think maybe the final page would reveal I was reading a book about a completely insane stalker/murderer of famous singers and I was only seeing it from Julian's point of view. But Cait is in on it too! I hardly think that some of the things that happened between Julian and Cait would really happen, but Phillips makes up for it by alluding to what an almost famous singer might be thinking (and maybe she is also a tinsy bit insane).

Phillips writing style is very clever. I must mention though --it is not okay to use a character to invent the stunning word "psychopharmacoddling" and have no other existence for that character in the book otherwise! Also, who can compete with "mustered relish"?!?! Possibly two of my all time favorite phrases. I would have also liked to see Julian's brother, Aidan and Julian's father be more than minor characters.

I can think of no better fictional read for a music lover. Phillips writes so well on the minute details of the relationships between people and music, that any other novel with an emphasis on music may not be necessary. On top of that, Phillips can describe bits of human nature that is spot on, just little things that I've never seen another novelist write about so accurately, or even notice in a human being at all. "That is exactly right" is what I was thinking a lot.

Julian's father's "belief in joy" is restored by hearing his own voice request a song on a Billie Holiday recording, while lying in the hospital as an almost-victim of the Korean War. Sometimes when times are tough, joy may only be found in music (and books). The Song Is You is the essential book on music, human nature, memory, loss, and nostalgia. I will be looking forward to Phillips' next book. Now it's time for me to catch up on the other novels by Phillips! show less

I expected a lot from the author of one of my favorite books, The Egyptologist, and I was only slightly disappointed. Both narratives include literary teasing and delayed gratification, but this one ends on a less satisfying (to some readers?) note. I enjoyed the entire journey and did not mind the lack of a "money shot" at the end.

The descriptions of music, and its emotional impact, were quite lovely, and the humor was sly.

Favorite lines:

"...as the bassist's left hand crept up and down his instrument's black neck like half of a hesitantly aggressive spider..."

"He had accepted that he was older than baseball players (even knuckleballers), older than astronauts, older than Playboy models, older than rock stars and Oscar-winning show more directors, but now he was reminded that he was older than people who went to nightclubs to hear live music, as his parents used to do. He calculated to be sure: yes, he was older than his father had been in those memories of his parents going out on the town."

"The best of him was a child's drawing of her on an off day."

"...the dual, peelable scallops of bronzed calf joining under the muscular H at the back of her knee..."

"The target was only microns wide, and history's great singers may simply have been those who happened to make a record in the brief time between learning and forgetting how to manage their power."

"That matronizing sentiment--one Rachel used to flash from time to time--combined with the slow insertion of food into red mouth, was a hardwired tactic of the human female. They would offer themselves sexually at the same moment they insisted they understood their potential mate better than he understood himself. The praying mantis just bites her male's head off, and only after the fun; the human insists upon dissolving her mate's personality before the pleasure."

[At the dog park] "...whimpering Labradoodles and Lhasapuggles, rotthuahuas, cocksunds, schnorkies, and shiht-boxes."

"She flared and glowed, the hot yellow center of a solar system planeted by these concentric eccentrics."

[At the dog park again] "...and a black Lab supposedly training to become a Seeing Eye dog but who threw herself on her back for tummy rubs so promiscuously for any passing pedestrian that her unlucky eventual blind man would be daily spun to the ground like a volunteer in a judo class." show less