Format
Paperback
Dimensions
5.36 (w) x 8.02 (h) x 0.63 (d)
Pages
288
Publisher
Random House Publishing Group
Publication Date
March 2010
ISBN
9780812977912
Book ISBN 10
0812977912
About Book
"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.
Reviews
Kate Christensen
A less rigorous writer might have turned this story into a sentimental, overwritten swamp. But thanks to Phillips's thwarting of our (and his characters') expectations, and to his objective, amused intelligence about the deep ways music affects us, he dances like Fred Astaire over any alligators and mangrove roots lurking in turgid waters…the whole novel zings with fresh insight and inspired writing. 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.
—The New York Times
Marie Arana
…incandescent…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.
—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
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. (Apr.)
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Library Journal
Jazz-reared Julian Donahue might love Music more than he loves People-and understandably so. People, like his dead infant son and ex-wife, tap deep and tangled emotions. Music, on the other hand, can be selected, the bad filtered out to build an ideal realm. It is in one of these worlds where our middle-aged ad man chances upon a performance by beautiful Irish twenty-something Cait O'Dwyer, a talented post-rock singer on the rise in New York's club circuit. What happens next is thankfully far from predictable: Julian does not have steamy, soul-redeeming sex with this younger woman-in fact, they never meet, instead carrying on an intellectual affair via the Internet and especially the iPod. In his fourth novel, Phillips attempts an antinovel wherein we are to be carried away by Music's power to disconnect us from and connect us to our most honest selves. This comes, unfortunately, at the expense of story and dramatic tension. Although Phillips writes with the precision and silkiness of Truman Capote, all we are left with is an Idea that begs to be animated somehow. 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. For larger fiction collections.
—Heather McCormack
Kirkus Reviews
A betrayed husband's fascination with a charismatic singer is given several intriguing twists in this subtle fourth novel from the versatile Phillips (Angelica, 2007, etc.). As he did in his widely praised debut novel Prague, Phillips focuses microscopic attention on the intellectual keenness and emotional vulnerability of each of his straying, struggling principal characters. Foremost are reluctantly aging director of TV commercials Julian Donahue, still sunk in grieving over his two-year-old son's death from a mysterious infection; Julian's estranged wife Rachel, whose own sorrows have steered her into promiscuity; and rising musical star Cait O'Dwyer, a bewitching Irish beauty who has become the darling of dimly lit jazz clubs and college campuses, and whose smoky sensuality brings back to Julian the vocal witchcraft practiced by Billie Holiday in her heyday. The simplicity of the tensions thus created is then skillfully complicated, as Phillips juxtaposes Julian's convoluted self-justifying fixation ("He could believe, with Cait in his life, that he could be free and tethered, young and old, joyful and mourning, forgiven") with a trenchant objective analysis of both his conflicted youth (among a loving and judgmental family) and his destroyed marriage. Whenever we expect it to suffocate in solipsism, this novel's scope instead widens. Intriguing parts are played by the footloose members of Cait's touring band, a sinister rock star turned painter (Alec Stamford) and Julian's older brother Aidan, an autodidact underachiever whose many failures are crowned by his embarrassing appearance on Jeopardy (from which, as it happens, author Phillips retired as an undefeated champion). Theproblem is Cait, whose ostensibly irresistible allure is never fully convincing; no more so, in fact, than is her reputation as a soulful songwriter-who, for example, rhymes "keep your distance . . . [with] don't leave a witness."Still, the novel's clashing harmonies seduce and fascinate. And Phillips still looks like the best American novelist to have emerged during the present decade.