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The Song Is You

by Arthur Phillips

ISBN13: 9781400066469
ISBN10: 1400066468
Condition: Standard
Dustjacket: Standard
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Staff Pick

Arthur Phillips's fourth novel is a beautiful, intelligent meditation on music, loss, and intimacy, a story of star-crossed not-quite-lovers who radically affect each other's lives. The Song Is You is Phillips's best book yet, as smart and intricate as Prague, but more generous and poignant.
Recommended by Jill Owens, Powells.com

Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)

"Is that the author you hear chortling with pleasure[?]....Phillips' sparkling prose makes for a seriously fun read." Heller McAlpin, San Francisco Chronicle (read the entire San Francisco Chronicle review)

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Julian Donahue is in love with his iPod.

Each song that shuffles through that greatest of all human inventions triggers a memory. There are songs for the girls from when he was single; there's the one for the day he met his wife-to-be, and another for the day his son was born. But when his family falls apart, even music loses its hold on him, and he has nothing.

Until one snowy night in Brooklyn, when his life's soundtrack — and life itself — starts to play again. He 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 for music and each other is played out, though they never meet. In cryptic emails, text messages, cell-phone videos, and lyrics posted on Cait's website, they find something in their bizarre friendship that they cannot find anywhere else. Cait's star is on the rise, and Julian gently guides her along her path to fame — but always from a distance — and she responds to the one voice who understands her, more than a fan but still less than a lover.

As their feelings grow more feverish, keeping a safe distance becomes impossible. What follows is a love story and a uniquely heartbreaking dark comedy about obsession and loss.

Called "one of the best writers in America" by the Washington Post, the bestselling author of Prague delivers his finest work yet in The Song Is You. It is a closely observed tale of love in the digital age that blurs the line between the longing for intimacy and the longing for oblivion.

Review:

"A television commercial director strikes up a bizarre relationship with the object of his infatuation in Phillips's enthralling fourth novel. Behind his hipness and attitude, Julian Donahue is going through an emotional crisis that started when his two-year-old son died of a freak infection. His wife, Rachel, reacted by vigorously cheating on him; Julian, meanwhile, went impotent. But his potency returns one night in his Brooklyn apartment as he listens to a CD by rising Irish singer-starlet Cait O'Dwyer. As his interest in her music and career grows into a full-blown obsession, Julian meets washed-up rocker-turned-painter Alec Stamford (who harbors a few of his own bizarre yearnings), and Julian is propelled to do more than mill around in the back of crowds at Cait's performances. Phillips is in top form and does a brilliant job of transcribing the barrage of Julian's sensory data into cool and flexible prose. This is a triumphant return for Phillips to the level he achieved in his wonderful debut, Prague." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

Life gets rough and we turn to our own private music like sinners to deliverance. It's a salve akin to prayer, a foil against the dust of life, a near perfect antidote for spiritual hunger. Or so, at least, it seems to Julian Donahue, a successful Manhattan adman, ex-husband, ex-father and baleful hero of Arthur Phillips' incandescent new novel, who numbs his existential pain with transporting shots... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) of song. When he isn't photographing vacant beauties for glittery ads, he lives in an embrace of earphones, suspended in a world of sound.

Father of a dead child, chaff of a decaying marriage, purveyor of vapid, pixilated promises, Julian is a middle-aged man on the verge — of just what, he does not know. With a passion approaching desperation, he listens to rock, to jazz, to old recordings by Billie Holiday that once sustained his war-ravaged father: "The songs now offered him, in exchange for all he had lost, the sensation that there was something still to long for, still, something still approaching, and all that had gone before was merely prologue." Julian, in other words, is a shattered soul, trawling his iPod for salvation.

In this general frame of mind, he wanders into a Brooklyn bar on a winter's night and hears a young Irish rock singer who is, herself, a soul on the verge, unsure of her art, looking for — just what, she does not know. She sings with her eyes "half-closed, hooded with sleepy availability," dark red hair tumbling over her face; and though her music doesn't exactly thrill Julian, she is appealing enough to make him want to buy her demo, if only "to try to keep up, a little, for work." In time, he finds himself standing on a subway platform, listening to her croon, "Will you leave no trace at all? ... Will you leave no trace at all?" and he is hooked, wondering how a songwriter could understand him so well, how a voice he hardly found interesting on initial hearing now seems to plumb his heart. He returns to the bar — an old man in a sea of children — and leaves her a series of cartoons, doodled on the backs of 10 paper coasters, instructing her, as an adman might coach a performer, on ways to improve her craft. "Indulge no one's taste but your own," he advises. "Discard mercilessly."

Little by little, he begins sending her fan notes, follows her bookings on the Web, calls in when she's on a fundraising talkathon, but he remains the stranger at the bar, unwilling to reveal himself, obsessed — maybe even in love — but fearful to lose his tenuous hold in a face-to-face meeting. She, too, is captivated, believing the scribbler who issues potshots from the dark to be the first man to truly know her, weaving his suggestions into her act as she climbs steadily to rock-and-roll fame.

It's a daring concept in a novel, this strange ballet between two damaged lovers — two souls so mortally afraid of tainting their dreams that they go to extraordinary lengths to keep each other at a distance. But longing and anomie are not new themes for Phillips. He has made a career of writing about characters who inhabit the fringe and harbor impossible fantasies. His first novel, "Prague," which won him immediate recognition, is a keenly perceptive story about American youths in Budapest after the fall of communism. "The Egyptologist" is an inventive comic novel about the eccentric discoverer of King Tut's tomb. "Angelica" is a clever Victorian ghost story, a literary trompe l'oeil. Now, in "The Song Is You," Phillips navigates an ostensibly arid present that turns out to be richly human, filled with unexpected grace, surprisingly connected by cellphones and instant messages. Along with these up-to-the-minute merits, a burning urgency animates the tale.

But "The Song Is You" is more than a cliff-hanging love story. Phillips' descriptions of his characters are filled with startling intensity. Julian's wife subsists on pills, washes them down with zin, trying to rid herself of the grief of no longer being a mother. Julian remembers their baby son, strapped into his pack, whispering a ghostly "hoo-hoo-hoo!" as together they ride the F trains. Julian's father lies between life and death in an Army hospital, cocking an ear to a live recording of "I Cover the Waterfront," listening for his own voice in the audience. But it is music — its visceral kick, its numinous wonder — that takes center stage. From Miles Davis to Carly Simon, from Bach's Cello Suites to Nat King Cole, we find ourselves wandering a labyrinth of memory, our ears, like Julian's, filled with song.

At times, Phillips can overdo the musical references. An author's note at the back of the book attests to his efforts to work song names into his prose. This schoolboy showiness is jarring in so gifted a writer. If I had a few barroom coasters in front of me, I might be tempted to write: "Indulge no one's taste but your own, Mr. Phillips." And "Discard mercilessly." But those would be potshots from the dark. Mere scribbles from an admirer.

Reviewed by Marie Arana, who is a former editor of The Washington Post Book World. Her latest novel, 'Lima Nights,' was published in January., Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Review:

"[T]he novel's clashing harmonies seduce and fascinate. And Phillips still looks like the best American novelist to have emerged during the present decade." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"The Song Is You is smaller, more focused and more character-driven than Phillips's earlier books, and it's not only a welcome new direction, but also a novel impossible to put down." Kate Christensen, New York Times Book Review

Review:

"Phillips...hits a pitch-perfect note in this heartbreakingly lyrical novel....Phillips both the tenor of our times and the fragility of contemporary connections." Booklist

Review:

"Music nerds who also happen to read fiction will be his most sympathetic audience, yet the author's many fans will also be curious about this noble experiment." Library Journal

Synopsis:

The bestselling author of Prague delivers a love story and a uniquely heartbreaking dark comedy about obsession and loss. It is a closely observed tale of love in the digital age that blurs the line between the longing for intimacy and the longing for oblivion.

About the Author

Arthur Phillips is the internationally bestselling author of Angelica, The Egyptologist, and Prague, which was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 3 comments:

: JILL HINCKLEY, January 12, 2010 (view all comments by JILL HINCKLEY)
Nothing much happens in this book. Before the story opens, the hero has separated from his wife, following the death of his infant son. Living on his own, he goes out one night to buy toiler paper and he stops into a bar to use their restroom. There he hears a young Irish singer in whom he gradually becomes interested, both musically and emotionally. Over the course of a year, interest gradually grows into mutual fascination, though the two never meet. Eventually they see the error of their ways. End of story.

The suspense is riveting! Phillips writes with such grace and power, his characters are so unusual and complex -- and the music references (and inventions) are woven so aptly and elegantly into the story -- that it becomes the proverbial can't-put-it-down page turner, as the reader waits with bated breath to see what the characters will do next.

Set to the soundtrack of the scrambled tunes in the heros' iPod, driven by blogs and tweets, fluid in time and space, this is the first indisputably 21st century novel I have read this century, which makes it a good choice for the Puddly.
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: KellyT, May 25, 2009 (view all comments by KellyT)
Guy meets girl, guy stalks girl, girl likes it. This novel -- about a Manhattan director of television advertisements and the on-the-verge singer to whom he anonymously passes advice -- isn't just about love and deciding the course of destiny for ourselves. It's the perfect book for any music-obsessed person who believes life needs just the right soundtrack. The director's estranged wife isn't very well drawn, and the writing can be a bit show-offish at times, but this is a very good book about the iPod generation, grown and growing up.
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: Erica Horne, April 15, 2009 (view all comments by Erica Horne)
Julian's marriage has fallen apart after the death of his 2-year-old son. At a Brooklyn bar, he happens to hear a young Irish singer named Cait O'Dwyer, sing.
Julian becomes attracted and obsessed by Cait and Cait is as affected by him as he is by her. They need each other and fall in love without meeting face to face.
This is a great unconventional story, and Julian must chose between his marriage and Cait.

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Product Details

ISBN:: 9781400066469
Author:: Phillips, Arthur
Publisher:: Random House
Subject:: Women singers
Subject:: Inspiration
Subject:: General
Subject:: Psychological fiction
Subject:: Love stories
Publication Date:: April 2009
Binding:: Hardcover
Language:: English
Pages:: 254
Dimensions:: 9.30x6.00x1.10 in. 1.00 lbs.

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