In Arthur Phillips’ latest novel, the iPod “plays a role as pivotal as Puck’s in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
In “The Song is You,” Julian Donahue, a director of TV commercials in his mid-40s, former philanderer separated from his wife and man adrift in a state he thinks of as “divorcistan, a coolly celibate land.” Music is the center of his sole surviving desire. This appetite is, yes, partly nostalgic because Julian has been curating a “soundtrack to his days” since the debut of the Walkman when he was 15.
A quick check of the Amazon “search inside the book feature” revealed some 41 name drops for the iPod, which wouldn’t particularly inspire me to read it but I loved Phillips’ “Prague,” about a bunch of self-absorbed 20-something expats set in Budapest haunted by the feeling they should really be somewhere more happening, namely, Prague. iPods in this novel sound like more just product placement…
Via Salon
Image used with a CC license, thanks to myuibe
