Review of “The Song Is You” by Arthur Phillips

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 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.

Rating: 4.5/5

Published by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., 2009

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