Anyone who ever met the late Jim Kilgo—teacher, sportsman, one helluva writer—came away with a story. This one is my favorite. As an undergrad at UGA in the late ’80s I was in one of Kilgo’s creative writing seminars, and one day Kilgo was going around the big table asking each of us where we saw ourselves going with our writing. He came to one guy, who had been something of an ass throughout the term, and the guy replied that he wasn’t actually into this writing thing, that he was going to go to law school and the only thing he’d probably write was his autobiography. Kilgo’s eyes narrowed into a withering stare for a beat, then he said, “Why the hell would anybody wanna read about you?”

I hadn’t thought about this episode in years, until recently a friend of mine was lamenting that she hadn’t done anything notable, that her life had failed to live up to the aspirations she had for it. It happens to all of us, the feeling as we get older that time is running out for whatever schedule we had established for our dreams. There’s probably another name for it, but I’ve always thought of it as the Buddy Holly Syndrome. When the plane went down on that fateful day in 1959, Holly was 22 years old—barely old enough to buy beer today but a founding father of rock and roll and one of its few true geniuses—and that piece of trivia will make you despondent when you consider how little you’ve done with the many more years you’ve been handed. When you’re young it makes for desperation; by the time you’re my age it becomes full-blown Middle-age Crazy.

What we fail to consider in this situation, however, is that Holly was a prodigy, a freak, a bolt of lightning like Mozart or Picasso. Most of us require time and experience for our gifts to emerge and mature into something worthwhile, and when we don’t wait for the right time, we often make bad decisions and bad art. It’s why I always express delight at reading a great first novel, because most first novels suck. They’re shallow and callow and overwrought with the excessive yet half-understood emotionalism of youth—they’re Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero or Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, flashy and loud and utterly disposable.

Hemingway’s famous dictum, “Write what you know,” doesn’t merely apply to writing about places you’ve been and things you’ve done, or even specifically about writing. It’s also about understanding what it means to have been there and done that, to have digested the experiences, internalized them and allowed them to inform your worldview. Knowledge is less important than wisdom, and while some people never acquire wisdom, nothing worth a damn was ever made without it, not a novel or a house, a painting or a child. Every one of us has a Great Work inside him or her, and we should never lament the time it takes to accumulate the tools to build it.

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A Damn Good Tune: Arthur Phillips is both a prodigy and a man with some mileage, and his fourth novel The Song Is You (Random House, 2009) is the sort of book that could only be written by someone who is both. It’s both smart and wise, a novel that roams over the pockmarked landscapes of sorrow and regret, obsession and longing, the scarred soul of a middle-aged man and the bright blaze of an ambitious woman in her 20s, with a tracker’s surefootedness and eye for detail. It is a sad and funny and wonderfully written novel, unreal and yet relentlessly true.

Julian Donahue is a man in his 40s building a high emotional wall brick by brick. A successful director of TV commercials in New York, he has retreated from the death of his young son and the resulting devastation of his marriage by shutting down his feeling self and getting lost in his lucrative but banal work. His only source of joy, his electronic lifeline to what’s left of his heart is his iPod, “that greatest of all human inventions.” Through his player Julian lives and relives his connections to people, past and present, in his 8000+ songs on endless shuffle. He is prepared for monastic solitude, closing up all points of entry to avoid further pain but at the same time locking his grief inside with him. Then he catches Cait O’Dwyer.

Cait is a singer-songwriter from rural Ireland working the Brooklyn clubs and building a slow, steady following among the cool kids. She’s beautiful, soulful, fierce and relentless in the pursuit of her career (musicians, take note: Cait does what you didn’t, which is why your band failed). She’s the kind of Poet Rock Girl we’ve all fallen head-over-balls for at one time or another (this town grows them like orchids), and Julian is no exception. Against his will, he finds himself entranced by Cait and her talent but, unwilling to be just one of the fans, one night he drops off some suggestions in cartoon form on some coasters, impromptu storyboards for her future. To Julian’s surprise, Cait responds to his message, and so begins a slow dance of long-distance communiques and near-meetings throughout the city and over the Internet that all at once draws them together and keeps them apart.

If these were any other people, this would be incredibly creepy, a young star and her middle-aged stalker—and the people around Cait, including her lovestruck guitarist and a skeezy would-be impresario, see it as exactly that—but Cait and Julian connect in a way that is uniquely intimate and can only be so as long as they keep their distance. As Cait’s career begins to take off, the pressure on both of them to consummate their relationship begins to build even as Julian’s wife mounts her own campaign to save their marriage. The last third of the novel is a complex battle of competing emotional tensions that comes to a head in (and this is a minor miracle for most fiction) the only possible way it can.

Phillips pulls off many such miracles in his remarkable novel, most notably in the way he writes about music, practically the third main character. Julian’s codependent relationship with his iPod; his father’s obsession, in flashback, with Billie Holiday, echoed in his son; the wholly accurate depiction of the near-telepathy and tensions that go into the process of writing and playing music (again, musicians take note); and how songs inform and define us. It’s damn hard to write about music, hence that old saw “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s why there are so many lousy music critics out there. I’ve only read three books in my time that got it right: Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Rob Sheffield’s Love Is a Mix Tape, and Lester Bangs’ Psychotic Reactions and Carburator Dung (that’s right, I said it). Now I’m going for it and adding The Song Is You to that list.

John G. Nettles