FICTION IN REVIEW

1 5 4 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W D A V I D G A L E F One time-honored way to make a reputation as a novelist is to write a fine novel and then repeat the performance, with minor variations, over the next twenty years. In all fairness, only a rare novelist avoids covering similar territory from one production to the next, yet the overly familiar creative-writing dictum ‘‘Write about what you know’’ never seems to include the all-important rider, ‘‘or learn more.’’ Doing research can be a chore, which is why so many departures from the novelist’s path seem mere window dressing (this one’s set in Kowloon) or, conversely, overly done (the writer spent five months in the archives, and the reader must slog through every last datum). So it’s refreshing from the outset to come across Arthur Phillips, sui generis as an author and in each of his works. In his first novel, Prague (2002), he chose to write about a feckless coterie of 1990s expatriates in Budapest who fervently wish they were elsewhere. Two years later, in The Egyptologist, he portrayed a magnificently self-deluding archaeologist around the 1920s, when TutankhaT h e S o n g I s Yo u , by Arthur Phillips (Random House, 260 pp., $25.00) 1 5 5 R men’s tomb was discovered, his wayward progress followed by a self-important sleuth and another detective following the first one decades afterward. Phillips’s third novel, Angelica, published in 2007, was lit by gaslight: an intense psychological study masquerading as a Victorian ghost story, the point of view shifting from a wife to her husband and then to their over-imaginative daughter, with enough shadowy depth to drown in. Phillips’s most recent, The Song Is You, concerns the romantic progress of an older man and a younger woman. It’s his most conventional to date, if any of his novels can be called that, although it displays the same deft expertise as the previous volumes: Eastern European politics in Prague, archaeology in The Egyptologist , Victorian London in Angelica. In this fourth venture, he shows an obsession with music: a compelling conversance with jazz, rock, and folk. His protagonist is Julian Donahue, once a promising film student but now a successful director of television ads, who broke up with his wife after the death of their two-yearold son, Carlton, and has been emotionally void ever since. He seeks refuge in music, even on the shooting set: ‘‘Julian plugged his iPod into the studio’s sound system and felt a physical relief as the day’s silliness was replaced with a sense of purpose. The soundtrack e√ect, as he had learned decades before: music could inject the quotidian with significance, lyricism, uniqueness.’’ The songs evoke moods; the moods evoke songs. The novel’s structure consists of a prologue and one section for each of the four seasons. One winter night in a bar, Julian meets an Irish singer on her way up, Cait O’Dwyer, and the storyline follows the progress of their relationship. Julian is taken with her ineluctable talent, and Cait is eventually struck by his shrewd assessment of her music. Over the course of the next year, we see the awkward dance of a courtship and its twin, avoidance. The feints and dodges include flirtatious e-mails, a drink o√er delivered to a turned-o√ cellphone, and one person entering the other’s empty apartment. Complicating the mutual a√ection is Cait’s guitarist Ian Rich- field, who lusts after Cait and considers her his discovery. Julian’s ex, Rachel, has been bruised by their breakup but is starting to hope for reconciliation. Adding to Julian’s complicated situation is his know-it-all older brother, Aiden, a former game-show winner 1 5 6 G A L E F Y who now supports himself as a crossword-puzzle composer and encyclopedia-entry writer, among other pursuits: ‘‘friction fiction for gentlemen’s magazines (under the name Anna Karenin, as whom he also answered lifestyle and intimate...