Like many peope, I picked up this book because of the lyrical review in the New York Times. In fact, I was so sold that I drove to the bookstore almost immediately, and hurried in to snatch the last copy on the shelf.

In my mind, I imagined that this book would capture the link between music and teenage angst, and take me back to the days when I walked around the block at night, listening to the Smiths on my Walkman, marveling at the then seeming brilliance of the lyrics "I wear black... (show more)

Like many peope, I picked up this book because of the lyrical review in the New York Times. In fact, I was so sold that I drove to the bookstore almost immediately, and hurried in to snatch the last copy on the shelf.

In my mind, I imagined that this book would capture the link between music and teenage angst, and take me back to the days when I walked around the block at night, listening to the Smiths on my Walkman, marveling at the then seeming brilliance of the lyrics "I wear black on the outside, because black is how I feel on the inside..."

But the "The Song Is You" is a darker, more complicated story. The protagonist, Julian Donahue, is a grown man, attractive and successful, who is still somehow stuck in that youthful notion that a feeling isn't really real until you've found a song that properly expresses it.

The most interesting thing for me about this book was to explore how that music-feeling symbiosis that I view as something rather adorable in a young adult, teeters on the verge of pathetic and self-absorbed in a person in their 30s or 40s. Julian becomes the literary version of Jason Bateman's character from Juno, a man who refuses to grow up.

I had hoped to relate to "The Song Is You". I didn't, and that was a disappointment. That is not Arthur Phillips' fault, because he has written a novel about two very particular, exaggerated characters, for whom music is a drug so powerful that life without it seems bland and meaningless. I wish I'd read this novel without reading the book review. I would have read it differently then, enjoying a good story about obsession and detachment, instead of waiting for the part that was going to say something to me about my life, to use another Smiths quote.

But maybe that is fitting: to finish this book with the feeling of having wished for someone else to describe in perfect detail my own experiences, to be connected to a stranger through an artistic medium. At the end of the say, that impossible longing is what "The Song Is You" is really about. (show less)

This is something as unusual as a piece of literary theory that you cannot put down. First off, the book is impeccably written, its language often on par with the masterful texts it analyzes. Secondly, and more importantly, this book actually tells us, or gets as close as anyone can to telling us, why great literature is great.

Most authors of literary theory aspire either to be purely inspirational (you can write too!), or to teach by example, by simply showing passage after passage of br... (show more)

This is something as unusual as a piece of literary theory that you cannot put down. First off, the book is impeccably written, its language often on par with the masterful texts it analyzes. Secondly, and more importantly, this book actually tells us, or gets as close as anyone can to telling us, why great literature is great.

Most authors of literary theory aspire either to be purely inspirational (you can write too!), or to teach by example, by simply showing passage after passage of brilliant text, as if good writing could be learned through osmosis.

James Wood, on the other hand, isn't afraid to dissect a famous text, to take a magnifying glass to it, and actually attempt to identify the components he perceives in the process. This makes him very courageous indeed, because what task could be more difficult than trying to make science out of art?

There will always be a mysterious, elusive side to literature, that no literary critic can get to. Let's call it inspiration. But then there's the craft, and the craft can be explained - to some extent. Wood gets as close as humanly possible.

Interestingly, Wood's observations are often quite plain, and make so much sense that they seem obvious, even trite. On several occasions, I was silently nodding my head, thinking: "My thoughts, exactly!" Yet the truth is that while I may have had an inkling, or a feeling, James Wood was the one who formulated that thought, and that is why he is brilliant, and I'm not. (show less)