Again, the universe wants me to buy a book
Like the karaoke book – which I liked – except with higher intensity.
First, the Onion AV Club summarizes Arthur Phillips' The Song Is You this way: "As Phillips' artful chapters flow into one another like tracks on a live album, the chorus of loneliness which Julian and Cait hear in each other's correspondence eventually drowns them out, and the would-be lovers hear instead only what they want to. A B-side to High Fidelity which laments the power of the ear even while celebrating it, The Song Is You struggles with the myopia of the modern musical experience without raising the stakes on either of its main players. Instead, confining himself as much to emotional truth as to their self-constricted worlds, Phillips simply describes their folly and makes it beautiful."
Then the San Francisco Chronicle mentions the Northwestern modern American-lit professor I didn't get until years later. "Where Nabokov slyly planted numerical clues and literary references in Lolita, Phillips embeds dozens of song titles in his text – beginning with his title, from Kern-Hammerstein. Perhaps someday a scholar will annotate Phillips as Alfred Appel did Nabokov, identifying every last musical reference."
And there's this lede on the Post review, one of radio cures I couldn't relate to more. "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."
November 21st, 2009 at 9:19 PM
[...] family house the other week for my brother's birthday, I tried to tell my mom the prologue of The Song Is You. Prologue was as much as I'd read at the time, and my explanation took forever. A [...]