Former jazz musician and Jeopardy! contestant Arthur Phillips won critical acclaim and the 2003 Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for Best First Fiction for his debut novel, Prague ( ). His subsequent novels, The Egyptologist ( ) and Angelica ( ), have also received widespread critical praise.
The Story: Julian Donahue, a middle-aged ad executive mourning the death of his young son and the dissolution of his marriage, wanders into a Brooklyn bar one wintry night and watches 22-year-old Irish pop singer Cait O’Dwyer perform. Moved by her music, he anonymously scribbles professional advice on the backs of some coasters, and she incorporates his words into a new song, creating a secret bond between her and her mysterious new muse. They begin to communicate through voice mails, e-mails, blog posts, forum comments, and photos surreptitiously snapped on cell phones. But their flirtatious digital dance grows more desperate as the two become increasingly obsessed with each other.
Random House. 245 pages. $25. ISBN: 1400066468
NY Times Book Review
"His maniacally brainy (brainiacal?) narrative voice seems to have been steeped in and tempered by the romance of all the songs that permeate the story, songs both embedded and overt, real and invented. … 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
San Francisco Chronicle
"The Song Is You takes on loneliness, alienation, middle age and what it means to feel passé and weighted down by your past—‘older than baseball players (even knuckleballers).’ Yet despite these sober concerns, Phillips’ sparkling prose makes for a seriously fun read." Heller McAlpin
Washington Post
"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. … Phillips navigates an ostensibly arid present that turns out to be richly human, filled with unexpected grace, surprisingly connected by cellphones and instant messages." Marie Arana
Boston Globe
"For the first two-thirds of The Song Is You, I kept thinking that if I had an iPod and a Y chromosome, I would understand and love this book, that I would glide over its pages instead of slogging through it with an ever-changing mix of appreciation, exasperation, and just plain perplexity. But by the end, I’d surrendered to its slow and sneaky pace, its oblique eroticism, its self-conscious but undeniable cleverness, and, yes, even become a grudging fan of its author." Julie Wittes Schlack
Christian Science Monitor
"Phillips takes amazing risks with the plot—Julian’s wooing comes straight from the Serial Killer Handbook. (Step 4: Break into target’s home and go through her belongings. Check.) … To balance that, The Song Is You offers a brilliant take on the music scene and a melancholy meditation on song." Yvonne Zipp
New York Times
"It’s a novel with a ridiculous, poorly articulated plot, and yet at the same time it’s a novel that showcases Mr. Phillips’s sparkling gifts as a prose stylist and demonstrates a psychological depth and emotional chiaroscuro that was missing in earlier works like Prague and The Egyptologist, which tended to be clever and eye-catching but often glib. … The problem is that Mr. Phillips never manages to make the relationship between Julian and Cait remotely credible." Michiko Kakutani
Cleveland Plain Dealer
"By page 200, I was dying for them to meet; instead, I had to settle for commentary on the Manhattan scene, the inflation of characters like Julian’s brother and Cait’s long-suffering, sneaky guitarist, and preposterous plot contrivances apparently designed to affirm that technology can bring us close even as it drives us apart. … Fans of the dependably erudite and usually witty Phillips’ earlier novels … won’t find the depth they’re accustomed to." Carlo Wolff
Critical Summary
Though critics praised Phillips’s playful, clever prose, they diverged in their reactions to his latest novel. Some appreciated his portrait of electronic-age relationships, while others found it difficult to accept the "hokey and contrived" (New York Times) coupling of a creepy stalker and his improbably nonchalant victim. Some saw Phillips’s hidden song titles, playlists, and repetitive tributes to iPods as ingenious depictions of the music industry, while others viewed them as blatant marketing ploys. The critics’ disagreement seemed to stem from their reactions to Phillips’s previous novels: detractors saw Song as a growth of his talent, but fans viewed it as something of a betrayal. An exploration of loneliness, alienation, and the power of music, The Song Is You is a tuneful take on a peculiar romance.
Also by the Author
Prague (2002): Phillips’s debut novel follows a group of misguided young American expats as they search for love and meaning in post-Communist Budapest.