‘The Song Is You’ by Arthur Phillips

The Song Is You

A Novel

Arthur Phillips

Random House: 250 pp., $25

The circle of young expatriates that Arthur Phillips assembled in Budapest in his debut novel, “Prague,” (you had to be there) are no doubt thickening at the waist now and may only dimly recall the game of truth and falsity called “Sincerity” they played in an effort to fool each other.

In the Phillips novels that followed -- the archaeological puzzler “The Egyptologist” and his tale of psychic or actual haunting, “Angelica” -- the line between truth and falsity was also troubled, in somewhat Sisyphean fashion. Little wonder, then, that as his novelistic eye turns to middle age and performing arts in “The Song Is You,” significant self-deception may be at work, as a fortysomething director of television commercials begins to obsess over a rising young rock singer. Siren-like, the object of his attention appears intrigued enough by his feinting approaches to deliver signals to him in return, through song lyrics, her website and e-mails.

Perhaps, that is. Or is Julian Donahue simply a stalker, abandoned by his wife, beset by sexual impotence and driven by loneliness, however much he fantasizes a healthy hookup with Cait O’Dwyer? Surreptitiously shadowing her on a European tour, Julian tries to hide when he encounters her band in a hotel lobby that is mirrored on three sides. Tucked behind a pillar, he “despaired at the infinite reversed and double-reversed and triple-reversed versions of himself, multiplying in all directions,” a description that could double as a plot schematic for his and Cait’s contrapuntal movements.

Essentially a seriocomic chase novel that aspires to be more than that, “The Song Is You” is tinged by darker elements as its backbeat, principally the estrangement between Julian and his wife, Rachel. She pops antidepressants and sleeping pills with abandon and holds slightly ambivalent but tenuous hopes for rapprochement. Both she and Julian were unfaithful in their marriage, and they bear grief separately now over the death of their 2-year-old son, Carlton, from an infection. Julian’s prodigiously intelligent but feckless older brother Aidan is another member of Phillips’ ensemble who finds himself adrift in midlife, and he wavers between his own attraction to Rachel and his interest in seeing the couple reunited.

Julian (childhood nickname, Cannonball) has professional self-doubts as well, since mostly what he does is photograph models using hair products. Yet when Julian first observes Cait sing at a bar in Brooklyn, his auteur persona does emerge: He sketches performance advice on the back of a numbered set of bar coasters that he leaves for her, anonymously. Later, smitten, he leaves yet another on which he draws a self-portrait, rendering himself as an Old West sheriff with his initials “J.D.” on his badge. Eventually he sneaks into her apartment (posters: Leonard Cohen, Joyce, Beckett) and ultimately, unannounced, into her hotel room, slipping into bed naked to await her arrival. It does cross Julian’s mind -- only to be dismissed -- that he “was a serious contender for the most ridiculous man on earth.”

Cait, who hails from County Wicklow, Ireland, and immigrated to America at age 18, is drawn as ruthless in pursuit of her dreams, willing to scuttle the relationships of her main guitarist, toy with his affection as a means of control, fire other band members at will and otherwise ensure that nothing impedes her success. Yet Cait largely escapes the book as a character, as if she had ducked backstage too often or was simply a song on Julian’s iPod all along, which is unfortunate.

On the upside, Cait’s rise to fame presents many occasions for Phillips to send up the world of would-be glitterati and comment on the creative process itself. An amusing secondary character is Alec Stamford, the former lead singer of a band named Reflex, with which Julian, who has encyclopedic knowledge of bands and performers, had been familiar. Alec impulsively takes up painting when his musical career founders -- once an artist, always an artist -- and has to remind himself “that most people survived without any fame at all.” With his director’s eye, Julian understands that Cait had to “produce and display emotion on demand in contoured, glistening miniature,” and of necessity, she required infusions of “feelings she could process in whatever artistic blender she carried within her, to extrude as art.”

We can say the same of novelists. Julian, whose iPod earbuds must feel like implants, recognizes that the soundtrack effect “could inject the quotidian with significance, lyricism, uniqueness,” and Phillips capitalizes on that to the extent that one can in a non-audio medium, by scatting along with musical references. But the soundless rhythm of language must carry his day, which, in occasional poignancy, it does. The novel’s most moving and perhaps musical line is uttered by Julian’s mother, who stumbled in on her husband taping a Billie Holiday performance off the radio. She could be speaking for all the novel’s characters when she says, caught on tape, “Sorry, my heart.”

Winslow is a former literary and executive editor of the Nation.