The Song Is You: Enjoy the ride, it's all gonna be okay

There's nothing wrong with Arthur Phillip's The Song is You. It was #11 on Amazon's Best Books of the Month for April 2009, and it received high praise from The New York Times. The book ranks #936 in Amazon's bestselling books, and is #612 in the Kindle store. Obviously people read the book and like it. I read the book, and didn't dislike it. Phillip writes well, the novel's setting celebrates technology as part of our daily experience, and the story centers around music- one of my life-long passions. But I felt no passion for The Song Is You. My first indication that my interest in the story was only lukewarm, was the unusually long time it took me to read the book. I needed about two weeks to get through 272 pages of The Song Is You, while I read all 608 pages of New Moon in three days.

Certainly some of the speed difference can be accounted for by the different processing speed needed to appreciate Phillip's beautiful prose. But the real reason it took me so long to read The Song Is You was that, about a quarter of the way through the story, I already knew how the book would end. How did I know? Well, it all comes down to Phillip's protagonist.

Arthur Phillips knows how to write very interesting and engaging characters. The protagonist's brother made me laugh every time he entered a scene. His would-be girlfriend was quirky, obsessive, and extremely interesting. The protagonist's alter-ego (the ex-musician/artist) always stirred up the story. But the protagonist, whose life history the reader learned in touching, intimate detail, was a very, very boring guy. Not only that, the protagonist was unsure of what he wanted, and as a result his attempts to make things happen in the story were half-hearted and lukewarm, much like my attachment to the book.

The Song Is You is a story meant to say: "enjoy the ride, it's all gonna be okay." I used to avoid reading mainstream literature, thinking this was always the message. However, I've come to enjoy many mainstream and literary authors (T.C. Boyle, David Wroblewski, Garrison Keillor, William Trevor, John Updike) who know how to write protagonists with unreasonable desires that they will fulfill at any cost. I've decided that "enjoy the ride, it's all gonna be okay" is just one genre out of many under the umbrella of mainstream and literary fiction. I'll bet "enjoy the ride, it's all gonna be okay" is a genre that's nice to read slowly, before bed, with the nightstand lamp lit. There's nothing wrong with the genre, it's just not my cup of tea.