By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
If a book is built, not just written, then Tom McNeal deserves some kind of award for literary architecture for his wise and heartbreaking novel, To Be Sung Underwater.
By Jeff Lucia
Tom McNeal's tale is built around the past, the present and what could have been.
By Jeff Lucia
Tom McNeal's tale is built around the past, the present and what could have been.
That's appropriate, because one of its main characters is a young Nebraska carpenter who has a lovely way with words and tools and life itself, at least when we first meet Willy Blunt.
His 17-year-old girlfriend thinks of it as "Willyness," his notion that "life didn't have to be as worn-down and reined in as people might have you believe; that in general, we all deserve a little more than we ordinarily think."
That notion haunts the entire novel, which is structured around then and now and a sense of what could have been.
Then was 27 years ago, when Judith Toomey spends her senior of high school in a small Nebraska town, where her father is teaching English at a state teachers college, a strategic retreat from the wife left in Vermont.
About the book
To Be Sung Underwater
By Tom McNeal
Little, Brown, 436 pp., $24.99
* * * * out of four
When Judith meets Willy, who's a few years older, wiser and more reckless, everything changes.
Now takes place in Los Angeles, where Judith, now married to a banker she met as a student at Stanford, works as a film editor and thinks, "If for one year all the movies were based on lives like mine, the industry's kaput."
She's vaguely discontent and wonders if she's falling out of love with her husband. "Or even already had. She hoped not, but she didn't need her mother to tell her that hope wasn't much of a stopper against the seepage of love."
In setting up his story, McNeal tells us that Judith believes in the the kind of love that, as she once explained to a friend, "picks you up in Akron, Ohio, and sets you down in Rio de Janeiro." (Her friend knows only the kind of love that picks you up in Minneapolis and sets you down in St. Paul.)
Judith believes in what she calls "the Rio Variation because she had once experienced it, but only once, and that with a boy she'd thereafter abandoned, and yet never quite left behind."
At first, McNeal shifts between then and now. Just when I began to race a bit through the Los Angeles parts to get to the Nebraska parts, he seamlessly merges two stories into one. To say more would spoil the plot.
His characters are often droll. The first time Willy phones Judith's home, her father announces: "It seems the romantic phase of your life has stolen up on us, Judith. I pray to God you've assembled the tools with which to defend yourself."
And they convey much in a few words: The older Willy says, "There's lots of women who see somebody's heart run over by a truck and they think they can put it together again."
It's McNeal's second novel. Goodnight, Nebraska (1998) won the University of Texas' James Michener Prize for the best debut by a writer who's at least 40. He's now 63 and, clearly, not a writer to be rushed.
A former teacher in Nebraska and California, he slips in references to other novels. Judith learns to share a passion for literature with her father, who recommends Henry James' Washington Square. When Judith finishes, she regrets parting from it.
I regretted parting from To Be Sung Underwater, a novel to fall in love with. It picked me up in New York and set me down in Nebraska. That's not Rio, but in McNeal's hands, it could be.
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
If a book is built, not just written, then Tom McNeal deserves some kind of award for literary architecture for his wise and heartbreaking novel, To Be Sung Underwater.
By Jeff Lucia
Tom McNeal's tale is built around the past, the present and what could have been.
By Jeff Lucia
Tom McNeal's tale is built around the past, the present and what could have been.
That's appropriate, because one of its main characters is a young Nebraska carpenter who has a lovely way with words and tools and life itself, at least when we first meet Willy Blunt.
His 17-year-old girlfriend thinks of it as "Willyness," his notion that "life didn't have to be as worn-down and reined in as people might have you believe; that in general, we all deserve a little more than we ordinarily think."
That notion haunts the entire novel, which is structured around then and now and a sense of what could have been.
Then was 27 years ago, when Judith Toomey spends her senior of high school in a small Nebraska town, where her father is teaching English at a state teachers college, a strategic retreat from the wife left in Vermont.
About the book
To Be Sung Underwater
By Tom McNeal
Little, Brown, 436 pp., $24.99
* * * * out of four
When Judith meets Willy, who's a few years older, wiser and more reckless, everything changes.
Now takes place in Los Angeles, where Judith, now married to a banker she met as a student at Stanford, works as a film editor and thinks, "If for one year all the movies were based on lives like mine, the industry's kaput."
She's vaguely discontent and wonders if she's falling out of love with her husband. "Or even already had. She hoped not, but she didn't need her mother to tell her that hope wasn't much of a stopper against the seepage of love."
In setting up his story, McNeal tells us that Judith believes in the the kind of love that, as she once explained to a friend, "picks you up in Akron, Ohio, and sets you down in Rio de Janeiro." (Her friend knows only the kind of love that picks you up in Minneapolis and sets you down in St. Paul.)
Judith believes in what she calls "the Rio Variation because she had once experienced it, but only once, and that with a boy she'd thereafter abandoned, and yet never quite left behind."
At first, McNeal shifts between then and now. Just when I began to race a bit through the Los Angeles parts to get to the Nebraska parts, he seamlessly merges two stories into one. To say more would spoil the plot.
His characters are often droll. The first time Willy phones Judith's home, her father announces: "It seems the romantic phase of your life has stolen up on us, Judith. I pray to God you've assembled the tools with which to defend yourself."
And they convey much in a few words: The older Willy says, "There's lots of women who see somebody's heart run over by a truck and they think they can put it together again."
It's McNeal's second novel. Goodnight, Nebraska (1998) won the University of Texas' James Michener Prize for the best debut by a writer who's at least 40. He's now 63 and, clearly, not a writer to be rushed.
A former teacher in Nebraska and California, he slips in references to other novels. Judith learns to share a passion for literature with her father, who recommends Henry James' Washington Square. When Judith finishes, she regrets parting from it.
I regretted parting from To Be Sung Underwater, a novel to fall in love with. It picked me up in New York and set me down in Nebraska. That's not Rio, but in McNeal's hands, it could be.
Source: http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/~r/usatoday-LifeTopStories/~3/IA4BlqhlfSU/2011-06-23-to-be-sung_n.htm
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