I cannot go so far as to call it an obsession. Hardly even a passing thought, really. Except for when I find myself in certain landscapes—namely, those of my hometown—I sometimes discover a thought rising up: what would it be like to bump into him? The adult version of the teenaged boy I used to obsess over. (I cannot believe I am the only person to have this thought.) In some ways it would be good to know what happened to him, how his life turned out, what became of his ambitions. In reality, however, it could prove to be disastrous. Not because of the threat of all those emotions rushing right back; I'm hardly the person I used to be. But isn't it better to keep that idealized, adolescent version of the person in your head? Reality—aging bodies and wrinkling skin and yellowing teeth—doesn't get any prettier with age, does it? And then there's the version of reality you're actually living, as opposed to the idealized and hopeful version you thought you'd get twenty (some-odd) years ago. I'm not certain the trade off (knowledge for the idealized version) would be worth it.

 

Still, the way that thought springs up with nearly predictable regularity (based on landscape or a song on the radio or even, very occasionally, the whiff of some memorable scent) leads me to believe that it is one of our more primal urges. Tom McNeal's novel, To Be Sung Underwater, suggests the same thing. Only, Judith Whitman (the book's protagonist) doesn't only think about it. She does, after much thinking about it, as well as the hiring of a private detective, make up a story to tell her husband and daughter about why she'll be gone for the next few days and then travels back to the small Nebraska town where she spent her last two years of high school. Not for your traditional high-school reunion, however, but to reacquaint herself with Willy Blunt, the boy she fell in love with just before she graduated.

 

Judith's relationship with Willy (a character I like so well I can forgive the author's choice of names for him) is so intense it makes your teeth hurt. They meet briefly one summer, but not until an odd set of circumstances brings them together do things start to spark. A construction worker with ambitions to start his own business (not a goal his father, who's been a farmer his whole life, sees as a good one), Willy is a dreamer and a romantic. The dates he plans for Judith are full of countryside and rising moons. Judith is almost instantly wrapped up in Willy. They don't know how to name it, or why, but the relationship is edged with a fatal sadness; nothing gold can stay. And while she intends, after graduating from Stanford, to return to Nebraska and to Willy and to his marriage proposal, Judith ends up staying in Los Angeles and marrying someone entirely different. 

 

Two decades later, her life at home in L.A. is not going swimmingly. She's not quite 100% certain but is fairly sure that her husband Malcolm is having an affair with his assistant. Camille, her teenage daughter, is in that prickly adolescent phase when closeness and trust seem an impossibility, and at any rate she's always liked Malcolm more than her mother. Judith's job—she's a film editor for a TV show—is starting to feel pointless and altogether too difficult. "First at work and then everywhere I went," she explains, "I'd be thinking things like, too much is too much, or enough is enough." The leads her to a strange action: she rents a storage unit, where she recreates the bedroom where she'd lived in Nebraska, down to the handmade quilt she'd purchased all those years ago at an estate sale.

 

All of this seems to be a novel about a woman having a midlife crisis, and maybe it is. Maybe her actions—the storage unit, the private detective, the trip to Nebraska to seek out an old boyfriend—speak to the tension of not being certain the life you have is the life you want, but being absolutely sure that the time to change that life is mostly gone. Rather than looking forward to figure out who she might become, Judith looks backward to see who she used to be, and finds she might have liked that person better. In that sense, it's not about a mid-life crisis, exactly. Instead, it is about looking at your life's intersections, the places you made decisions that forced you to turn a way you hadn't anticipated, to understand if you shouldn't have kept going straight after all.

 

Adultery is a divisive subject. I have friends who won't read books that include it. But I'm really not even sure if what happens when Judith shows up at Willy's reclusive cabin could be called "adultery." In a strange way, her marriage to Malcolm feels more like the real adultery, because she never stopped loving Willy. She simply got tangled up in the new opportunities life gave her after she left him in Nebraska. Yet, like their adolescent relationship, their experiences as adults are edged in sadness. Not just outlined with it; steeped. There is the fact of reality and of how they have each changed since they were last together. This is especially true for Willy, who never moved on from Judith's departure. "For you I was a chapter," he says, "but to me you were the whole story." He has formed a successful life, with a wife and children and a thriving construction business. But he is, quite simply, unhappy.

 

Saying "I loved this book" about To Be Sung Underwater might be a strange statement. It's not a happy book. But it's simultaneously full of knowledge, beauty, and a quiet, peaceful joy. That contrast made it linger for me. I've continued to think about it: how, for example, the book's title neatly closes up its ending, and how it makes living the idea of how choices define us and which ones are the hardest to make. Choosing between something that is wrong for you and something that is right can be painful, but the choice eventually resolves itself. It is the choice between two right things that is the hardest, and the one that you continue to look back at, until life turns again and you can no longer see which way to go.