BKMT READING GUIDES
The Song Is You: A Novel
by Arthur Phillips
Hardcover : 272 pages
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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 ...
Introduction
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.
Editorial 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 NissleyExcerpt
Chapter 1Julian Donahue's generation were the pioneers of portable headphone music, and he began carrying with him everywhere the soundtrack to his days when he was fifteen. When he was twenty-three and new to the city, he roamed the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, claimed it as his discovery, colonized it with his hours and his Walkman. He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics. Play on, Walkman, on, rewind and give me excess of it. ...
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Discussion Questions
1. What can a description of music really convey about music?2. Is that different from descriptions of books?
3. Is THE SONG IS YOU a love story? If so, between whom?
4. What other writers does Phillips remind you of?
5. Can you trace his influences in your other reading like Julian could trace Cait's in his CDs of other musicians?
6. Is Julian a stalker?
Suggested by Members
Notes From the Author to the Bookclub
"There is one aspect of this novel that is autobiographical, and only one. It is the depiction of a man in the throes of that most tumultuous love affair: man and iPod. I have always been, as Julian is, someone obsessed with music and my music collection, because I learned very young that a music collection is also a memory collection, like a photo album, but able to affect almost all the senses. And so, I knew that eventually I would want to write about a book about that important relationship in my life. The first image that came to my mind was of someone listening to me as I sang -- very loud and out-of-tune -- to the music only I could hear in my headphones. What if someone were listening to that deceptively private moment? I was, at the time, on a beach, almost all alone, and it occurred to me that someone could be standing right behind me as I screamed this song, and I wouldn't know it. I turned. I actually turned around in that burst of paranoid embarrassment. there was no one there, of course, only the flash-feeling that I had stumbled into a possible story..."Book Club Recommendations
Recommended to book clubs by 1 of 1 members.
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