Review: The Song is You

The Song is You by Megan Abbott

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



The third I've read, and probably best so far, of Megan Abbott's noir works, The Song is You is the story of Jean Spangler, a Hollywood starlet who vanishes without at trace after heading out to meet her exhusband/spend a night on the town (depending on who you ask). I didn't know until after I'd finished this that it's based on the true-life disappearance of Jean Spangler. This hypothetical "what if?" take on the starlet's vanishing act focuses mostly on Hollywood fixer Gil Hopkins as he tries to make sense of what happened to Spangler, and his role in her disappearance.

As has been pointed out before, Abbott knows her way around pulp. Her take on the Hollywood of yesteryear is grim and full of scandal. Pretty faces hide hollow hearts, and everyone in her Hollywood is either playing or being played. There's more sex, drugs, and violence here than you'll find in most films coming out of Hollywood today, but that puts it in good company with the books Abbott is paying homage to.

Hop's trip down memory lane, as he tries to remember the last night Jean was seen alive, takes him to plenty of dark places. It's his job, after all, to keep his clients spic and span, no matter how much dirt they roll around in, or how much blood they spill. And Hop is very, very good at his job.

The book fires on all cylinders when Hop is struggling with his conscience and trying to track down what really happened to Spangler. Half the time he can't tell if he wants to bring the truth to light or bury it so deep it can never be found. Is he covering his tracks, or exposing an injustice? That ambiguity creates a tremendous amount of tension, and make Hop one of Abbott's best creations to date. Hop's search for Spangler mimics his own search for his moral center (or, indeed, to figure out if he even still has one).

Like any good Hollywood noir, this one is full of deception; the plot twists and turns and every time Hop (or the reader) thinks he has it locked down, it slips away. If The Song is You has a flaw, it's that the plot eventually sinks a little under the weight of the twists and turns. By the end of the book, I couldn't decide if Hop was chasing the trail, or so sleep deprived and paranoid that he was creating false connections just to punish himself.

Luckily, the crisp writing and fast pace of the book more than make up for the overly layered plot. Like a lot of great noir, the devil isn't so much in the details as it is in the style and prose, both of which are top notch here.

A very solid entry; this is strong enough that it's got me wish I had more than one more of Abbott's noir novels left to read.




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