To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal

Once in awhile you can choose a book for its title, and then find out that the book is even better than the title. Such is the case with Tom McNeal’s fascinating novel, To Be Sung Underwater.  The book was recommended to me by a reader friend along with a half dozen others, and it was the title that moved me to find and read this book first. I almost put the book aside after reading just a few pages when I realized that the lead character was a woman and the author a man. In my experience, male authors rarely do well with first-person narrative using the voice of a woman. This is one of those rare exceptions.

We are introduced to Judith, the lead character, when she is forty-four. She has, she supposes, a good marriage, a precocious and successful (if rather bratty) teenage daughter, and the job of her dreams as a film editor. And yet she feels oddly vacant and unfulfilled. She explains to her friend and co-worker, Lucy, how out of the blue a kind of swerve has occurred in her life. Not, I suppose, unlike the famous Epicurean swerve that Epicurus used to explain both how humans could have free will in an otherwise determined universe and also how the contra-causal swerve of a single atom had begun the formation of compounds and of the universe as we know it. “My life had utterly settled into itself and then this little…swerve occurred, or maybe I meant it to occur, maybe I’d actually plotted it out in one of those corners of your brain or heart you access only in dreams.”

Judith is renting a storage locker to store some old furniture which her husband, Malcom, thinks should be thrown out but that has great sentimental value for her. When asked to supply a name for the rental agreement, she suddenly and inexplicably decides to give a name that she has not thought of for years. The sudden out-of-the-blue giving of the name propels her back to a time when she was living with her father in Nebraska and met her first love, a boy name Willy, whom she has not seen for twenty-seven years. The reader is then taken on a journey with Judith that moves back and forth between that distant seventeen-year-old Judith and the present one.

Although billed as a love story, I see this novel more as an exploration of marriage and of the many ways marriages can go wrong, along with a gentle reminder of how it might also go right. Judith’s mother, Kathleen, has little good to say about her own marriage or about marriage in general. 

All marriages come with a pinhole leak, her mother once said. Marriages swallow love and excrete grief. Marriage is a house a woman can’t leave and a man merely visits. (Or, as a variant: Marriage is a house with a woman locked inside.)

One morning, sitting at the kitchen table—this was after Judith’s father had left them in Vermont to take a teaching position in Nebraska—her mother said to Judith, “Our marriage, like all marriages, was happy until it wasn’t.”

In many ways Judith has carefully arranged her life to counter her mother’s grim predictions, and she has done so successfully. She had a successful career, “a smart socially capable daughter, and a husband who loved her.” But she also has two secrets: one the lingering love for the boy Willy whom she left behind when she went off to college.

The other of Judith’s important secrets was her fear that she hadn’t properly inhabited her role as a mother. She knew she loved her daughter, but it was a love with a strange insulating distance built into it.

Once Judith’s parents begin to live separately, she finds herself attracted and repelled by each. While sympathetic to her mother and to her mother’s belief that her husband has simply abandoned them both, she is bothered by her mother’s attempts to befriend Judith’s young friends, “It’s like she wants to be my age.” And while her father is comfortable with the separation, admitting that he prefers to live apart, he refuses to take Judith’s side in her criticisms of Kathleen. “People separated from their spouse…they’re almost like stroke victims. They have to learn everything over again…I can tell you from personal experience that the way we get around at the beginning isn’t always pretty.”

Judith first visits her father in Nebraska simply on summer vacation, but then frustrations with school and with her mother lead her to request moving in with him for high school. It’s during this later, longer stay that she meets and falls in love with an older boy, a carpenter who is already out of school and living on his own in Rufus Sage, Nebraska. The story of their young love is beautiful and convincing on so many levels. He introduces her not only to sex and intimacy, but in important ways brings her to a new and different view of nature. Like her professor father, Judith is a reader, an intellectual, and assumes as a matter of course that she will go on to college and have a career. Willy is not a reader, and while he respects and admires Judith’s talents, he is happy and centered in his life as a carpenter. Small town life suits him well, and especially for his relatively young age, he is self-contained and comfortable with himself. 

I’m not about to reveal the twists and turns in their young love except to say that Willy is a lovely and loving young man. He seems to want Judith for just who she is; his love for her is genuine and whole. While their aspirations and dreams of the future do not neatly dovetail, this is a young man who (unlike most) is willing to follow Judith where her life takes her, and to adjust his own life to hers. 

As the so-called swerve has ripple effects on Judith’s life propelling her into first imagining and then to some extent living out an alternative life with Willy, this reader was sometimes taxed in his not quite willing suspension of disbelief. And yet, McNeal manages to create an almost believable story, and one that describes a love so much better and so much more wholesome than the possessive and narcissistic ones typical of Hollywood and pop novels. Willy is certainly the most honorable of the characters, and somehow some of his authenticity seems to rub off on others. 

I will leave you with a quote which I think sums up my appreciation of this book. The line is uttered by Kathleen, Judith’s mother, as she finds herself falling in love with Judith’s dad.

Sometimes I think of a cover of a book as a door to another world…but other times I think of it as an escape hatch from this one.’ And then she blinked and said, ‘I guess it’s the same thing.

I think you will be glad you opened this particular door.

Private Life by Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley, like all great writers, can look out at the world from one small private life and reveal a universe to the reader. In her recent 2010 novel, Private Life, she takes her readers on a slow and painfully meticulous journey from 1883 to 1942 as seen through the eyes of a clever but rather plain girl, Margaret, the third child in a family of five. Within the first few pages of the novel, we are informed that Margaret’s two older brothers are dead by the time Margaret is eight, and that her father, a doctor, commits suicide six months after the death of his oldest son. Margaret’s mother, Lavinia, says simply that his suicide had to do with melancholic propensities. Lavinia moves with her three remaining children, all daughters, back to her father’s farm, the practical thing to do, and tells Margaret, “because she was the oldest, that death was the most essential part of life, and that they must make the best of it. Margaret always remembered that.”

It is the subtitle of this excellent novel that gives away the theme: Private Life: Marriage can sometimes be the loneliest place. In a novel whose pace is slow enough to resemble a lived-life, Smiley tells us that Margaret’s younger sisters, Beatrice and Elizabeth, are successfully married off while Margaret, an old maid at twenty-three, is left behind. Margaret is not particularly troubled by her unmarried status, nor is she particularly keen on finding a man, although she is surprised that her feelings are hurt when she overhears her new brother-in-law describe her as forbidding. He continues:

But she never looks at a fellow, and if she makes a mistake and lets him catch her eye, she glares like fury. I don’t know anyone who can stand up to that sort of thing, at least in the beginning.  

And then you don’t know what she means half the time. I ask myself once a day, is she making a joke. The fellows can’t take that. It makes them feel thick…A fellow doesn’t want to feel as though a girl is running rings around him, at least not till her marries her.

And then when Margaret is twenty-seven, a brilliant scientist who has for mysterious reasons lost his university position and returned to the small town in Missouri where his mother still lives, takes an interest in her, and rather out of the blue proposes marriage. An astronomer who wonders about the universe but seems rather oblivious to the world around him, Andrew whisks Margaret off to an island off the coast of California where he has access to a small telescope, and there she begins her life as a married woman. Her mother’s parting words as she leaves Missouri, “You’ve always been a good girl, and now you’ve had a piece of luck, marrying at twenty-seven, but a wife only has to do as she’s told for the first year.”

Perhaps Margaret should have listened more carefully to this advice, and also to the veiled implications. It turns out that Andrew is an odd man, socially inept and naïve, “day after day, year after year, he thought only of the universe, which he could not see.”

While Andrew obsesses over his view of the universe and stews in resentment as an alternative view, that of Einstein, comes to prominence, Margaret becomes his audience, his assistant, his typist, eventually his driver. After a miscarriage and then the death within weeks of an infant son, Andrew gives up on both sex and the idea of children and devotes himself with renewed passion to describing his view of the universe. Of course, he expects Margaret to assist him in the writing of his masterpiece and his battle with the fools who fail to understand his brilliance. Andrew’s reaction to the short life and death of their infant son, Alexander, confirms for Margaret in a new way his utter self-absorption. And as she continues to type his manuscript and ferry him around to speaking engagements, she also begins to be aware of the reaction of others to her husband’s work. And then reading a newspaper article in responding to Andrew’s theories, she comes to a new, not quite startling realization.

As she read Mr. Malisoff’s words, she knew what had motivated him to write—Andrew’s blustering, grandiose claims, his circular reasoning. She knew that as well as if God himself had whispered in her ear. Just then, she saw Andrew as the world saw him, and she did it all at once, as if he had turned into a brick and fallen into her lap—who he was that solid and permanent for her—he was a fool.

Much like Kate Chopin’s lead character in The Awakening and so many other women who are faced with the prison of an unhappy marriage, Margaret has now to live with her comprehension. Smiley’s brilliance is in describing in considerable detail the day-to-day struggle of living with a man who is “Opinionated and energetic, loud and forbidding.” Margaret does not walk into the sea, nor does she suddenly throw off the shackles of a loveless marriage, but she does in small ways begin to assert her inner self. And she realizes more and more that she is in an arranged marriage, as certainly as if their had been a bride-price and signing of documents between man and man. 

And of course there was no help for it, except recalling bits of conversations she had overheard from time to time about marriage. That’s what knitting groups and sewing groups were for wasn’t it? Commiserating about marriage. But through the years no one had said what she now thought, which was that marriage was relentless and terrifying, and no wonder that when her father died her mother had risen from her bed and gone to work.

There is no happy ending to this book, no dramatic escape into a new world. And yet Margaret does persevere. Coming to understand how she came to be married to this strange obsessed man, how his mother and her mother conspired together to do what they thought best for their offspring, constitutes a kind of freedom. And as she did in A Thousand Acres and so many books since then, Smiley shows us not only the ways in which marriage has been (and still is) a prison for many women, but how strength and endurance can win small victories and point to a new horizon. I find myself uplifted and enlightened by the quiet life of Margaret and rejoicing in her small joys, and stunned once again by the brilliance of Jane Smiley.

The Life of Objects by Susanna Moore

Coming of age stories almost always interest me, no matter the country or the period of time. The Life of Objects, by Susanna Moore, is an extraordinary coming of age novel about an Irish girl, Beatrice, who wants nothing more than to escape her cruel and restrictive mother and her Irish village. She is seventeen when her story starts, but in most ways a very young seventeen due to her mother’s tight, cold rein on her life. A Protestant girl in a mostly Catholic town and not allowed to associate with any Catholics, her single outlet (both emotionally and intellectually) is the Church of Ireland cleric, Mr. Knox, who keeps a small school and who has a passion for birds. There being no lending library in Ballycarra, it is through the books loaned her by Mr. Knox that she learns of the larger world.

Mr. Knox liked to say that novels help to show us that the world is a place of strangeness, ruled by chance, which makes it difficult to maintain our certainties. I had no certainties other than my desire to leave Ballycarra.

And leave she does through a series of happenstances she could not have foreseen. She says of her mother:  “her disappointments had rendered her bitter and unkind. My father and I were in constant dread of her. I lived in a chaos of desire and disappointment.” Her mother takes her out of school at fifteen, thinking that Mr. Knox is filling her head with ideas that would do her no good in the world of haberdashery, and installs her in the small shop owned by the family. She is not allowed to read in the shop, “lest it appear that I gave myself airs,” and so, using materials stolen from the shop, she teaches herself to crochet, and then to make lace. Eventually, her father not only secretly provides her with thread, but begins to display pieces of lace she has made in the shop; the fine lacework is seen by a wealthy woman, who gives her two books of lace patterns, and this in turn leads to an encounter with a foreign woman, Countess Hartenfels, and finally an invitation to escort the Countess to Berlin where Beatrice will live as a lace-maker in the house of a wealthy family, the Metzenburgs. 

What I have not yet mentioned is that this move, so thrilling for the young Beatrice, occurs in 1938, just as Germany has launched its aggressive campaign across Europe. Felix Metzenberg, besides being a wealthy collector of art, has been a politically influential force in Germany who served in the Great War, and whose memory of that time makes him extremely skeptical of the Nazi party and its campaign. Having refused a foreign ambassadorship position in the new regime, he is looked at with suspicion, and soon decides to leave Berlin and take his treasures to a country home where he will be less scrutinized. Although he offers to pay Beatrice’s passage back to Ireland, and warns her that he may not be able to protect her in the uncertain future, she elects to remain with the family.

I’ve told this much of the story, which the reader gets in the first thirty pages or so, simply to set up the dangers and moral dilemmas that face the family as the war continues and enlarges. While the Metzenburgs oppose the tactics and ambitions of Hitler and the Nazi party from the beginning, they obviously have to do so with great care. All during the war, they harbor Jews and others who are perceived as enemies of the regime, and return to a kind of feudalism with regards to the villagers who come to depend on them for produce, employment, and various forms of protection from the authorities. 

What I found particularly fascinating about this book was the view of it from inside Germany and through the eyes of a family whose sympathies lie with the allied forces of Europe and who rejoice at the bombing of Berlin even when the bombs are being dropped on them. 

Not only the rich and powerful in Germany, but even many of the poor villagers still close their eyes to the rumors of the murder of Jewish prisoners, and at least pretend that “the humiliation and misery inflicted on the country were in part the fault of the Jews, who had forgotten their place…” Felix argues against such views, both with the villagers and his rich friends. 

Felix said that he once believed that humanism had been founded on the shared need to know. It had grown more and more apparent to him, however, that the opposite was true—we were united by our shared need not to know. ‘By the time that we understand what is happening,’ he said, ‘we are already complicit.'

In spite of the fact that I was born in 1941, the year America finally entered the war, I continue to be astounded by my own ignorance of the immensity of loss, the unbearable hardship of so many from so many countries. My view of Pearl Harbor was that of a few Japanese planes somehow reaching Hawaii to sink a few ships, not of the nearly four hundred planes that flew in three waves to sink eighteen ships and leave three thousand dead. And although I have read about the firebombing of Dresden, I had no idea that in March of 1945 a thousand B-17 bombers destroyed the center of Berlin. 

Perhaps reading novels is a lazy way of learning history, but I am so grateful to novelists like Moore who do such meticulous research and then so skillfully put into real flesh and blood stories about the suffering and bravery of millions of Europeans, Russians, and yes, Germans. 

As the tide begins to turn and Germany begins to lose the war on many fronts, the lives of the Metzenburgs and the villagers become even more difficult, and unfortunately, even with the surrender of Germany and the advancing armies of Russia and America, the lives of Germans who had resisted the Nazi’s and at least covertly aided the allies do not magically become better. Whether it is German soldiers looting and ravaging the land as they retreat, or the victorious Russians doing about the same as they occupy, the lives of rural farmers and thousands upon thousands of refugees fleeing first one way, and then the other continue to spiral out of control. This is a searingly sad story, but told through the compassionate eyes of Beatrice, there is something beautiful and profound about it. I leave you with her words:

During the war, we had scavenged at night and slept in the day. Children had not gone to school. Animals had not foaled. Thre’d been no appointments to keep or to cancel, no market days, weddings, or funerals, and no cars, buses, trains, or horses to get us there, had there been someplace to go. There’d been no telephones, electricity, petrol. No medicine. No money and no food. 

We had survived, but we were different people.