Music can only ever offer language metaphor, suggested Roland Barthes. Certainly, the musical metaphors pile up with increasing urgency in T. Austin Graham's interdisciplinary study of American modernism: Richard Powers's work is made “more audible” (206) through its references to Miles Davis and the Beatles; recovering the now-forgotten popular songs in F. Scott Fitzgerald affords a literary “recapitulation” (110); attending to the songs mentioned in literary texts enables readers to build an interpretative “bridge” (211). His rigorous and well-researched study begins with a spry summary of literary–musical scholarship, before discrete chapters offer up an impressive range of approaches: jazz invigorates a chapter on American free verse and form, taking in Whitman and Eliot; three of Fitzgerald's novels are then mined for their musical soundtracks; the third chapter on the Harlem Renaissance suggests how its musical allusions might prompt a rethinking of its racial categorizations; the fourth chapter explores how the culture of the Broadway musical might inflect readings of Dreiser and Dos Passos; the study concludes with a whistle-stop tour of musical allusions in contemporary Anglo-American fiction.

As this brief summary suggests, Graham's project is as interested in the cultural performance of music as in its melodies or rhythms. His thoughtful discussion of Whitman and Italian opera turns its attention to the social diversity of American opera audiences rather than the music they are listening to. In a fascinating reading of “Italian Music in Dakota,” Graham shows Whitman's use of foreign opera as a way of shaping and attuning the audience for his own poetry. Generally, this approach works better when the new musical material inflects existing readings (as in the Fitzgerald chapter) than when it collapses them (as in the sometimes sweeping generalizations of the chapter on the Harlem Renaissance).

One of the repeated tensions this careful study uncovers is the continuing tussle between modernism and popular culture, one that has only been heightened by New Modernist scholarship. Graham notes of the Shakespearian rag invoked by T. S. Eliot, “it would be scarcely remembered at all were it not for its place in The Waste Land” (65); modernism becomes a time capsule for the ephemera it is apparently writing against. The recovery of popular culture in modernism is decidedly paradoxical: to historicize is rarely radical, but to draw attention to the significance of popular culture in an apparently high art form is an expansive gesture. This is a contradiction that Graham's study remains keenly aware of: indeed, his sensitivity to the broader cultural issues at stake sometimes causes him to hedge his bets. An accompanying website provides audio clips for the reader; this is a wonderful resource, which will benefit any scholar of American modernism. Yet its presence sometimes occludes extended discussion of the music itself. In keeping with such critical evasion, the popular songs under discussion are often afforded a transcendental humanism that no literary text would be allowed: Papa Charlie Jackson's “Shake That Thing” prompts the following comment: “black or white, male or female, urban or rural … such divisions ultimately appear irrelevant in the case of this popular number” (160). It is difficult to imagine a work by Fitzgerald or Powers being gifted such utopian qualities. Elsewhere, the conclusions are more cautious: the Shakespearian rag of The Waste Land is “strangely equivocal” (64), while Fitzgerald makes use of the song “Kiss Me Again” in This Side of Paradise in the spirit of “indeterminacy” (91). Given these readings, it is strange to find Graham conclude that Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 would “spin out of control without its here-and-now grounding in rock and psychedelia” (204). Music, ever the slippery customer, appears as a hermeneutic expedient, helping us to understand the complexities of modernism, yet elsewhere complicating what we might dismiss as a “chorus girl novel.” This is an interpretative difficulty of which this book, too, seems well aware.

The sexual politics of modernism's literary–musical exchanges are perhaps more problematic than this study allows: the introduction offers a defence of an all-male author list by pointing to their female musical subjects, a detail which hardly assuages the problem. It also might have been instructive to consider the longer historical contexts for these works: a good deal of work on nineteenth-century literary–musical modernism could be brought to bear here. These reservations aside, the work as a whole will prove a valuable addition to our understanding of American modernism and sound studies. More significantly, it revives an important debate about the cultural value of musical modernism, and offers its readers not only a distinctive thesis, but a distinctive soundtrack to accompany its deft articulation.