Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19757 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-07
• Released on: 2009-04-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400066469
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, April 2009: A man who's not quite young anymore, his relationship trouble, and his iPod: at first glance Arthur Phillips's The Song Is You sounds like strictly Nick Hornby territory, but it turns out to be a lot closer to The Red Shoes, a story of love and art in which the two are confused and jealously compete. And as in The Red Shoes, but so rarely in other works of art, it's the art-making that carries the most power and mystery. Julian Donahue is a "creative": a skilled director of commercials who has come to know his limits. Cait O'Dwyer is a singer, and a bit of a comet that Julian somehow catches the tail of. Their courtship--as Julian evades a marriage split by an unbearable loss and Cait shoots single-mindedly toward stardom--is an intricately constructed pas de deux that is both surprising and convincing throughout. It's Phillips's first novel set in the present since Prague, and in its artful structure, style, and heart it's a match for that smart and charming debut. --Tom Nissley

From The New Yorker
Phillips’s best writing achieves an elaborate, gratifying precision, combining a naturally flamboyant style with neat, observational wit. This quality is sharpest in some of the character portraits and delectable set pieces that animate this novel, his fourth, but the central plot is sometimes strained. A middle-aged advertising director, whose marriage has broken up following the death of his two-year-old son, plays an invisible and unlikely muse to a young Irish singer on the brink of stardom. As the two engage in an indirect seduction—they never meet—the narrative veers close to the “adolescent fantasy” that its protagonist fears. But this curious bond provides an armature for Phillips’s beautiful evocation of music’s consoling power to blur the borders between art, artist, and consumer.
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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Marie Arana 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's incandescent new novel, who numbs his existential pain with transporting shots 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's 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.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

It's the novel you'll treat like a favorite album...
Arthur Phillips gave an interview to Amazon for this book and that interview found its way to my Kindle via the Amazon Storefront. In it, Phillips discusses his passion for the iPod and his feelings about music - how each song revives a memory, a moment, a relationship; how a record can make you feel as insecure as the rainy day after 9th grade when you heard it, or a song can make you shake in longing for the person who shares the memory of that song with you. Phillips was right, and as soon as he said this book took that approach and crafted a story about/around/inspired by it, I knew I had to read it.

Phillips gives his readers an honest, voyeuristic, captivating journey through the past, present, and future of Julian and the ones important to him. Phillips uses songs to shift through time and space fluidly from memory to memory, telling stories not in a chronological order but as randomly as the songs on his iPod appear that trigger the memories.

Julian finds a new musician, Cait, and follows her career from a lowly dive bar to an international tour. Along the way, he begins finding his attraction to her spread deeper and more thoughtfully, as he connects her lyrics to the moments in his life past and present. Cait's music and persona help him cope with his past regrets, deal with his present aimlessness, and his longing for...he doesn't quite know what, maybe just his longing to be longing over something.

Julian writes/draws out some feedback for Cait at a show and it gets around to her; from then on til the end, the relationship becomes something torn between friendship, romance, mentorship, mutual therapists, and philosophers. The two never come face to face, but they spend the book dancing around the courtship of one another and finding ways to tease along the desires they both sustain for each other.

"The Song is You" took me on a journey I wasn't expecting. I found myself longing to get to the end, then pulling back and hoping it wouldn't come. I expected a trip down memory lane with music and memories intertwined, as the interview suggested, but this novel became so much more than just that. It weaves and flows with suspense, tension, and anguish, like a great mystery or thriller.

Take your time and enjoy "The Song is You." It's the novel you'll treat like a favorite album; you'll be enjoying it over and over again when your ears (and in this case, your eyes) just can't tolerate anything less.

I loved this book
A must. The incredibly talented Phillips has come into his own. The Song Is You is as cerebral as his earlier work, but tender as well. For the first time, he seems to view his characters with a compassionate as well as critical eye. A meditation on creativity, memory, loss and love, it's gentler than his other work, but Phillips hasn't lost his edge. The chapter on Aidan's stint on Jeopardy is priceless.
It's beautifully written, engrossing, and often hilariously funny. Destined to be one of the best books of the year.

Cait O'Dwyer Fan
I am not sure what attracted me to this book at first, but one reviewer mentioned it was about a guy with his ipod. That is an extremely simple and ignorant way of looking at this novel.

I will not go into recapping the story except to say middle aged Julian has had a very emotional roller coaster of a life when he stumbles in a little club and hears the Irish swan song calls of Cait O'Dwyer, a young and rising musician on the scene.

What ensues is a journey through and with Julian's life and his search to find something "real" to hold onto, hence, his Greatful Dead-like following of Ms. O'Dwyer.

Love of music from Julian's father, especially jazz, truly links the two generations together and like father, like son, music seems to be the only constant true love.

Arthur Phillip's writing might be some of the best this reader has ever read. I found myself re-reading paragraphs due to my astonishment of his use of language and words. He is a remarkable writer and because of the writing I will be looking into his previous book Prague.