The Song Is You

“If novelists were labeled zoologically, Arthur Phillips would fall naturally into the dolphin family: his writing is playful, cerebral, likable, wide-ranging, and inventive…His maniacally brainy (brainiacal?) narrative voice seems to have been steeped in and tempered by the romance of all the songs that permeate the story, songs both embedded and overt, real and invented. A less rigorous writer might have turned this story into a sentimental, overwritten swamp. But thanks to Phillips’ thwarting of our (and his characters’) expectations, and to his objective, amused intelligence about the deep ways music affects us, he dances like Fred Astaire over any alligators and mangrove roots lurking in turgid waters…The whole novel zings with fresh insight and inspired writing…Impossible to put down.”