I thought that this would be a Nick Hornby-esque meditation on music and relationships by someone who actually likes music, but here we have only a perfunctory taste of what the music mentioned in this book actually sounds like. We are presented with a live recording of Billie Holiday singing "I Cover the Waterfront", and the narrator's father's obsession with the song and memories associated with it, to show us how music and love are entwined with obsession. Or something. None of it is very convincing, especially the fact that the narrator, Julian Donahue, and an up-and-coming rock singer, Cait O'Dwyer, have a very strange and compulsive relationship based on nothing more on some drawings Julian left for Cait on some bar coasters. The lyrics to Cait's songs are not very good, and Julian seems to listen to nothing else on his iPod, which leaves his love of music in question. Also, no spoilers, but our hero Julian also turns out to be a weird, selfish dick in the end. I don't recommend this one. Cheers. ( )

(52) I can't quite figure out how I feel about this author. On the one hand, I loved 'The Egyptologist' and the other one about King Arthur and the forgery the name of which escapes me. But I disliked 'Prague' and I almost disliked this one, but it was finally saved for me when I sat down and read a big chunk in one sitting. I am so glad it ended the way it did and there were parts that were lovely, but parts that were so self-conscious and overwritten. Julian is a middle-age man separated from his wife and stalking a young rock-star. Though it seems he has actually made a connection with her and is almost serving as her muse and mentor. He becomes obsessed with her at the expense of attending to his own life. His own life, in particular, his parents and his marriage and child were much more poignant than the rock star bit.

The book was at its best delving into the minutiae of his parents courtship and life. I loved the Billie Holliday parts with the old scratchy recordings in which he could hear his father and then his mother's voices. I love how those kind of things from a life before you can be so haunting. The book was at its worst when the protagonist was whining about the fictional rock star Cait. Her life and faux music was tiresome and that part of the book felt pretentious. I dunno - I almost think the novel would have been more powerful without her even though their weird courtship was the central plot.

So mixed feelings - Phillips can write, but I think he does better with irony and clever fantastic plots than with these angsty male romances like this one and 'Prague.' ( )

Hot Irish singer chick falls in love with a self absorbed commercial director who's grieving over the death of his son. Here's the twist (spoiler alert)-they never meet.
Love, loss, the importance of the Ipod playlist. Nick Hornby on steroids and too clever by half. ( )

I think this is Arthur Phillips best novel (although I haven't read Prague). It is a perfectly written and plotted story about middle-aged man obsessed with a younger singer, who also appears obsessed with him. But they keep passing it in the most glancing of manners. Reading it through the lens of the unreliable narrators in Phillips' earlier books made it more interesting. ( )

I expected a lot from the author of one of my favorite books, The Egyptologist, and I was only slightly disappointed. Both narratives include literary teasing and delayed gratification, but this one ends on a less satisfying (to some readers?) note. I enjoyed the entire journey and did not mind the lack of a "money shot" at the end.

The descriptions of music, and its emotional impact, were quite lovely, and the humor was sly.

Favorite lines:

"...as the bassist's left hand crept up and down his instrument's black neck like half of a hesitantly aggressive spider..."

"He had accepted that he was older than baseball players (even knuckleballers), older than astronauts, older than Playboy models, older than rock stars and Oscar-winning directors, but now he was reminded that he was older than people who went to nightclubs to hear live music, as his parents used to do. He calculated to be sure: yes, he was older than his father had been in those memories of his parents going out on the town."

"The best of him was a child's drawing of her on an off day."

"...the dual, peelable scallops of bronzed calf joining under the muscular H at the back of her knee..."

"The target was only microns wide, and history's great singers may simply have been those who happened to make a record in the brief time between learning and forgetting how to manage their power."

"That matronizing sentiment--one Rachel used to flash from time to time--combined with the slow insertion of food into red mouth, was a hardwired tactic of the human female. They would offer themselves sexually at the same moment they insisted they understood their potential mate better than he understood himself. The praying mantis just bites her male's head off, and only after the fun; the human insists upon dissolving her mate's personality before the pleasure."

[At the dog park] "...whimpering Labradoodles and Lhasapuggles, rotthuahuas, cocksunds, schnorkies, and shiht-boxes."

"She flared and glowed, the hot yellow center of a solar system planeted by these concentric eccentrics."

[At the dog park again] "...and a black Lab supposedly training to become a Seeing Eye dog but who threw herself on her back for tummy rubs so promiscuously for any passing pedestrian that her unlucky eventual blind man would be daily spun to the ground like a volunteer in a judo class." ( )