Brenda's Book Bash

The Song Is You, by Arthur Phillips (Random House, 2009)

Julian Donahue, the narrator of Arthur Phillips’s new novel, begins the story by describing the evening when his father, as a young man on his way to the Korean War meets his future wife at a Billie Holiday concert.  The important part of the memory, according to both father and son, though, is not the happy coincidence of their meeting, but rather the painstakingly re-imagined moment when the famous singer responds to his song request—“I Cover the Waterfront”—which sustains him through the surreal and life-altering loss of his leg in a battle injury just a month later. While recovering in the hospital, he learns that the performance was captured on a live album, sent to him by Julian’s mother before she knows what has happened to him. He is, the narrator suggests, resurrected by the sound of his own request captured at the beginning of the B side as much as by his ability to tap into the restorative power of Holiday’s melancholy and smokey voice.

As it turns out, this lushly detailed prologue prefigures much of what is to come, especially its suggestion that we are defined by the music we listen to, and that somehow our passion for it allows us to take partial credit for its production and impact. Julian’s most important possession is his i-Pod, and his unabashed pride in the playlist isn’t so different from that of the album collectors in the now quaint vinyl days who alphabetized their shelves, cleaned their stereo needles regularly and took great pains to put their records back in their dust jackets. Julian’s collection includes many digitalized versions of his father’s old recordings as well as the songs of his own youth and middle age. It is interesting to note that Julian is in his forties when the novel opens, so we cannot assume that this way of defining himself is a youthful and passing fancy. Neither his father’s nor his passions are at all blunted by middle age.

The course of Julian’s life is also altered by a live performance when he goes to a Brooklyn bar to listen to punk rock band fronted by Cait O’Dwyer, a young Irish woman whose local fame is about to push her to the next level of celebrity. Julian is no outsider to the celebrity-making machine. A former film school standout, he now makes his living directing commercials, and there is a long passage early on in which he describes his ability to detect the qualities in a beautiful woman, not apparent to agents and the actresses themselves, that will be tested and fade in front of the camera. He analyzes all the aspects of her performance with this clinical eye and makes some cryptic suggestions on a set of coasters that he asks the bartender to deliver to her after the show.

That’s how the secret relationship with Cait begins, and their communications form the action of rest of the novel, though, as in his first novel, Prague, this action is a cover for the real meat of the story, which, in the case of The Song Is You, is about how we handle devastating personal losses and encroaching middle age in a culture enamored with youth. To say more about the plot of the novel is to ruin the surprising and cleverly imagined game Julian and Cait play and the subtext that emerges as a result of it.

Phillips shows too much sympathy for his characters to be called a satirist, but his greatest skill is his subversively wicked humor. All of the characters in the novel are vaguely ridiculous at times, but their damaged lives are too much like our own for us to despise or dismiss them. Like his 1990’s ex-pats living in Budapest but worrying that all the real fun and excitement is to be had in Prague, the characters in The Song Is You have too much in common with us to comfortably despise them. Phillips recreates the blustering arguments we have about pop singers that chronicle our hip subculture’s obsession with “selling out” even as we create the opportunity for it, and our dread of the over-the-hill performers of our youth whose paunchy pathetic lives have become the fodder of the most ridiculous “reality t.v.” shows. One of the most poignantly funny and emblematic scenes comes in a flashback to the impending death of his father where Julian describes going to hear a ancient jazz pianist whose name he recognizes from Billie Holiday’s introduction on another of his father’s treasured live recordings. The old man plays non-stop in the seedy soon to be closed Quaver jazz club till 4:00 in the morning, playing one handed every few minutes so that he can use his other hand to lift the constantly refilled glass of gin. At the end of the night, his bar bill is bigger than his payment for the gig, and Julian, who has been flirting with the waitress all night and is the last person in the bar, introduces himself and pays his tab. The old man, Dean Villerman, tells Julian that he must be mistaken, that he never played with Billie Holiday, but he needs a place to hang out till his morning train to Boston. Julian and the waitress take the old man back to her apartment where Julian lets him listen to the recording on his i-Pod in order to convince him that he actually had, in his dimly remembered past, sat in on a session with Holiday. “With his eyes closed, but awake (he’d occasionally yell something), Dean Villerman listened to an entirely forgotten hour of his life from thirty years before. Julian’s sexual exploit for the morning was postponed indefinitely as the waitress fell asleep on the far end of the couch from her elderly guest, and Julian sat on the only chair—stolen from the Quaver but camouflaged with a leopard-skin cushion—watching Dean’s face react to the music. ‘Who said, Sorry, my heart, he inevitably shouted, ‘Or did I just dream that?’’’