(Random House)

www.randomhouse.com

BY JAKE CLINE

Julian Donahue, separated from his wife and mourning the death of his toddler son, is toying with the idea of growing up. He's stopped screwing the models he shoots for shampoo and floor-cleaner commercials, begun properly grieving the death of his Korean War-veteran father and come to the realization that, at the dawn of his 40s, his life is more than likely half over. No less significantly, he also no longer bothers to keep up with popular music. His iPod is filled with more than 8,000 songs, but the titles are old, familiar and occasionally obscure, stretching from mid-'90s alt-rock all the way back to late Billie Holiday. Music hasn't lost its power for Julian, but that power has now been dulled by coarse nostalgia and a sadness he has fooled himself into believing he can control.

In addition to being a late-coming-of-age story (which is not to be confused with a midlife-crisis story, which this book isn't), The Song Is You, the fourth novel by the New York-based Arthur Phillips, is also a love story. Early in this engaging, lyrical work, Julian, caught outside in a hard snow, steps into a neighborhood dive, a "hole in the night" called the Rat, in search of a bathroom. Retreating to the bar for a drink and curious to find out if the striking, redheaded woman leading a band on-stage has talent to match her looks, Julian fights back the mild shame that he is not only the oldest person in the bar by at least a generation, but also that he doesn't "know any bands anymore." He watches the group's performance, buys a demo CD and heads back into the night.

At work a few weeks later, his iPod plugged into his studio's sound system, Julian is taken by a song he doesn't recognize - a female voice singing, " ‘I'd sooner die,' she said, she said, and she almost believed it, her little drama." The singer, of course, is the woman he saw in the bar, a 22-year-old rising star named Cait O'Dwyer, a charismatic Irishwoman whose CD Julian had forgotten he'd even uploaded to the iPod. And with that, Julian is reminded that music can do more than simply jog unpleasant memories from the not-so-deep recesses of his mind and deposit him in dark places he'd just as soon not visit.

His appreciation of Cait's music becomes an "infection," and Phillips describes this transformation with the accuracy of someone who on more than one occasion has been stung in the heart by a fresh and exciting song: "And after that first shock of love comes trepidation. A younger Julian would have reset the needle, rewound the tape, replayed the track again and again, sucked the song down to its marrow until it held nothing but thick nostalgia, accessible only years later. But, older now, aware of how rare this experience was, he rationed ‘Coward, Coward.' If it showed any signs of weakening, of becoming merely catchy, he skipped it, set his iPod back to shuffle and hoped the song would recharge, surprise him. And the singer did."

What music fan hasn't felt that same rush, that sense of discovery you both want to share with everyone you know and keep to yourself as if it were a blush-inducing secret? If Phillips is an exceptional novelist and storyteller - and he certainly is both - he is also a first-rate music writer. Better still, he's the opposite of a music snob: an unapologetic fan and relentless champion of songs famous and unknown. He understands that few things can move a person - for good or for bad - quite like music, and The Song Is You  is as much about Julian's burgeoning and reanimating feelings for Cait as it is about music's ineluctable ability to make you feel part of something great, whether it's a Billie Holiday concert recorded before you were born or a poorly produced demo purchased for a few bucks in a sticky bar in which paint peels from the walls in wide, toxic sheets.

Without explicitly doing so, Phillips' book suggests that even a work such as "Thunder Road" can sometimes strike the listener as being just a song, a simple gathering of notes and chords tossed into the air like confetti. But at the right moment, "Thunder Road" -- or "I Cover the Waterfront" or "Space Oddity" - can be something else entirely. As Julian comes to relearn this, he begins a 21st-century romance with Cait: He leaves her encouraging, anonymous messages on her Web site, flirts with her when she takes his call during a charity telethon and even leaves her professional advice on coasters at the Rat. Much of the book's suspense derives from the question of when, if ever, Julian and Cait will meet in person, and Phillips presents one missed opportunity and coincidence too many. (A subplot involving Cait's jealous guitar player's hiring his cartoon-cop cousin to stake out Julian challenges the reader's credulity.) And even though the resolution of Julian and Cait's tentative courting becomes obvious by the novel's midpoint, following these two seeking, intelligent adults to that place never feels like an intrusion or a mistake.

Throughout The Song Is You, Phillips' writing is filled with grace notes and crescendos, solo voices and multipart harmonies, brilliant guitar solos and full-on jam sessions. But it's never messy and only rarely does it fall out of key. You don't read this book so much as sing along with it.