by Tom McNeal
Inside the Jaguar, Malcolm had fallen back asleep. When she tapped on the driver’s-side window, he again bolted awake, this time with an expression of apprehension. He lowered the window.
“I’ll drive,” Judith said. “I’m not sleepy.”
Malcolm said he was fine now, he would keep driving, and really, she thought, who could blame him? She wouldn’t trust her either.
They drove on and on. When he found cafés for breakfast and lunch, she ordered dry toast and tea, then, finishing before he did, went out to wait by the car. He forced the issue for supper, so at a restaurant in St. George, she ordered soup with her toast. It was twilight when the car sped through the Virgin River Gorge, and it turned dark again as they crossed the desert. Traffic piled up in Las Vegas, and again someplace to the west where the highway narrowed from three lanes to two. They were soon crawling along so slowly that Judith had to fight the urge to get out and walk. Four-wheel-drive vehicles exited from the interstate and appeared to be bouncing across the desert itself, the beams of their high-mounted headlights fluttering above the dark landscape. “Lunatics,” Malcolm said, sounding tired and testy, and Judith, staring out, said nothing. The word positraction came unbidden into her mind.
The house from her father.
The summer camp from Willy.
The years before Milla went away to school.
These were the elements at hand, and Judith, staring out at the lights of the straggling cars crossing through the desert, wondered what, if anything, might be built from them.
When finally they crested the Cajon Pass and turned into the San Bernardino Valley with the vast expanse of shimmering lights spread before them, the dashboard clock read 2:17.
“Okay,” Malcolm said. “Okay.”
He seemed desperate to be home.
Judith felt numb. The touch of her finger to her chin barely registered. She pinched and tugged her cheek and was surprised how rubbery her skin felt. The freeway signs and sights seemed only artificially familiar, as if she’d before viewed them only in movies and travelogues, was now finally coming to visit, and found everything depleted. She closed her eyes and left them closed until the car slowed and they pulled into the driveway of their house, which, too, seemed only strangely familiar. The garage door rolled quietly closed behind them.
“There,” Malcolm said, as if a discouraging task had finally been completed.
Judith got out of the car and went inside and walked to Camille’s room. On the wall, the crescent moon was lighted. Camille was asleep. She’d gone to bed with wet hair; she’d covered her pillow with a bath towel. Judith used the step stool and slipped into the bed, and Camille turned toward her and said in a sleepy, whispery voice, “Hi, Mom, is that you?” and then, without waiting for an answer, or perhaps already finding it in Judith’s shape and smell, the girl shifted and her breathing fell again into the rhythms of sleep. Judith thought then that she, too, might sleep, but she couldn’t sleep. She closed her eyes and could not sleep. The scene played again and again and again, unchanged and unchangeable. The bright watery eyes, the crooked smile, the slight parting of the lips as if to speak.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts for their support during the writing of this book; to Mary Jo Markey for her help with the minutiae of film editing; to Barbara Myers, Cathy Karabensh, Orval and Mary Weyers, and my cousins—the former Moore girls—Susan Vastine, Nancy Fisher, and Jenny Hughson, for their help with Nebraska-based details; to Jack Duckworth, Gary Fisher, Randy “Bird Man” Lawson, John L’Heureux, Fred McNeal, Michael Sykes, Ted Vastine, Diane Wilson, and Tobias Wolff for stray facts and observations that found their way into the book; to Jim Hall and Dana Reinhardt for their critical assistance; to George Ledbetter and his staff at The Chadron Record for supplying me with old newspapers and a quiet room in which to read them; to Peter Matson, Judy Clain, and Michael Pietsch for their belief in the book and assistance in bringing it into print; and finally to Laura, for everything, A to Z.
About the Author
Tom McNeal was educated at the University of California and Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer. He spent parts of boyhood summers at the Nebraska farm where his mother was born and raised, and he later taught school in the nearby town that was the inspiration for his novel Goodnight, Nebraska. His short fiction has been widely anthologized, and “What Happened to Tully,” which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, was made into the movie Tully. He lives in California with his wife, Laura, and sons, Sam and Hank.
Reading Group Guide
to be sung underwater
a novel by
Tom McNeal
A conversation with Tom McNeal
Willy Blunt is very vivid on the page. Was there a real-life model for Willy? When you started writing, did the story grow out of the characters, or vice versa?
There was a rough model for Willy, a friend I’d known since he was twelve and whose death was imminent when I started writing the book. When he was in his early twenties, this friend was betrayed by a woman he was absolutely crazy about. The woman moved breezily on, but he never completely recovered from it. After my friend died, I had the powerful need to give him—or the fictional character roughly based on him—a more introspective girlfriend, one who might not have completely forgotten him. As for the chicken-or-egg, character-or-story question, who can say? I do know that until I’ve got characters whose company I really want to keep for a while, nothing moves forward.
You bring Judith Whitman so powerfully to life in To Be Sung Underwater. What were your inspirations for her character? As a writer, do you encounter any particular challenges when inhabiting a woman’s perspective versus a man’s?
Judith is much more a composite character than Willy. I have a friend who is a film editor in L.A., and she generously helped me with those details. The rest comes from observation, I suppose, and from whatever it is—voyeurism, empathy, curiosity—that makes a person want to write in the first place. The challenge is the same whether the character is male or female: what will make a reader believe in and care about this person and this predicament? The strong emotional reactions some women have to Judith have been the surprising thing. There are readers who don’t much like the decisions Judith makes, who pronounce her unlikeable, in fact, but I always thought of her as smart, curious, and almost courageous in her sense of purpose. She has backbone. She knows what she wants and goes after it—but she’s also self-aware enough to look back and wonder how big the bills have been for her decisions, and who has paid them.
You might call To Be Sung Underwater a cross-country novel, with set pieces in Vermont, Nebraska, and California. How important is a sense of place to you when you set out to write a story?
Well, I love Vermont and California, but of the three settings mentioned, Nebraska is the one to which Judith, in the end, wants to return. As much as anything, that’s a reflection of my own yearnings. My mother has always told great stories about growing up in Nebraska, and when we were kids, we’d take annual trips back to the farm where she was raised. I loved it there, and I loved the stories she told, so when I began to write in my early twenties I moved back to a little town called Hay Springs, a fictionalized version of which became the setting for my first book, Goodnight, Nebraska. A couple of times now I’ve written about characters who come to Nebraska as outsiders and eventually see it as an elemental place where a fulfilling life can be led. A feeling still comes over me when I go back there—it’s as if you can see farther and breathe deeper—and when Judith returns to Nebraska after a long absence, I wanted her to be struck by this sensation, too. Fiction is often about finding out where you belong.
What are you drawn to more as a writer—young love like that between Judith and Willy, or love that has an older vintage?
One way to answer that is to say that in the making of the book nothing was more pleasant than writing about the
summer when Judith and Willy fall in love, and nothing was more difficult than writing the last section, when they look back from a great distance and try to make some sense of it all. But, really, the pull between two people of any age, along with the elements that work in resistance to that pull, are always going to interest me as a reader and a writer.
How did you come up with the book’s title? Does it have a special significance for you?
I came up with the title in much the same way that Judith came into contact with Samuel Barber’s choral piece, which is properly called “To Be Sung on the Water.” She mishears it in the living room of her father’s home. I misheard it in the guest cottage where I was working on the book, and the mistaken phrase took hold. I loved the idea of hearing music underwater, probably because I’ve always loved the altered way we receive sounds when we float in an ocean or a pool or a lake, and, in the end, Judith’s perspective is altered in a similar way. As for the choral piece, I recommend it. It’s an incredibly beautiful, somber, evocative song, based on a poem by Louise Bogan, to which Barber applies rhythms that suggest the pull of oars, or so it seems to me. By the way, I learned recently from a friend and former student of mine, Janet Elsbach, that there’s a term for mishearing a phrase and rewriting it in your head: it’s called a “mondegreen.” Isn’t that something? And now I’ve figured out a way to drop it into this Q and A.
You’ve been involved in the construction business and built your own house in California. What are the parallels between building a house and building a novel?
I wouldn’t want to carry this too far, but clearly you need to have some design in mind, although I should say I’m not the kind of writer who starts out with a full set of working drawings. But I suppose it’s not much of a stretch to think of building a house and writing a book in parallel terms. And on the most basic level, one happens board by board and wall by wall and the other happens word by word and chapter by chapter.
What are you working on next?
Another novel. Three principal characters in a rural setting. I’d give more details, but I guarantee that anything I say now will bear only the sketchiest resemblance to the final product.
How do you respond to reviews?
When I’m working on a book, I spend a lot of time in the arrangement of the words. I want the sentences not just to bear the characters and their stories forward, but also to bring pleasure without distraction. So, like most everyone else, I appreciate the good reviews and cringe at the bad ones, but I’m especially pleased when the prose itself gets positive notice.
Were there particularly memorable moments that came from the publication process?
Nothing matches the note from Little, Brown editor Judy Clain saying that she’d stayed up late and then broken appointments the next day to read the book, and while finishing it in a New York City coffee shop had fellow diners wondering what she was weeping about. There were some funny moments, too, especially after the book came out. The most comical were furnished by something that my wife, Laura, refers to fondly as Manglish, which seems to result from English having been badly translated to Chinese and back again, original intentions flung like sucked bones. Laura and my niece, Adeline, embroidered tea towels with their favorite lines, as follows: “What if a initial adore is usually a single that unequivocally takes?” And: “The bed with the nation coverlet is the initial place she as well as Willy ever done love.” Got to admit, those are fun to dry the dishes with. I myself am partial to this one, which pinballed its way from an interview in which I’d noted that hard circumstances can produce sturdy people: “It’s a some-more component hold up as good as you’re surrounded by a little flattering stout people.” I don’t care what your line of work is, you can never have too many little flattering stout people around.
Do you have a favorite among the recordings of Samuel Barber’s “To Be Sung on the Water”?
I do. It’s by the Cambridge University Chamber Choir under the direction of Timothy Brown. The album is called Samuel Barber: Choral and Organ Works. If you don’t want to buy the entire work, you can download just the one song: 89 cents well spent.
Questions and topics for discussion
In a departure from the normal course of her life that Judith calls a “swerve,” she rents a storage unit and registers it under a fake name. Where do you think that impulse came from?
Would Judith have started to think about Willy so intently had she not undergone her “swerve”? How might things have gone differently for her and her family had she never made that phone call?
Judith believes in the kind of love that “picks you up in Akron, Ohio, and sets you down in Rio de Janeiro.” What do you think of this “Rio Variation” on love? Do you think that such connections are almost inevitably short-lived? Is it the combination of brevity and intensity that makes them linger in the imagination?
Tom McNeal has said that while “the road less traveled” is the more overt theme in the book, he had in mind an examination of marriage as an institution. All of the principal characters weigh in on the subject at one time or another. Judith’s mother’s approach is aphoristic—“all marriages come with a pinhole leak”—but at one point Judith wonders if a successful marriage might not be defined as one in which “the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.” Using this as a measure, what do you make of Malcolm and Judith’s marriage?
To what degree does Judith make her mother’s pessimistic pronouncements regarding marriage come true? Did you ever feel that those aphorisms had a dangerous power—that they were predictions Judith wanted to escape but couldn’t?
Judith’s daughter, Camille, is full of spirit and opinions and doesn’t often kowtow to her mother, which Judith finds irritating. Did you see any connections between Camille and the younger Judith we see in the scenes from her youth?
What do you think of Judith’s father, Howard Toomey, and his decision to leave Vermont and put down roots in Nebraska? What part do you think Judith’s shallow roots in Nebraska—the fact that she’s an outsider, not a native—played in her decisions about Willy?
Did you think that something untoward was happening between Malcolm and his secretary? How did you feel about the timing and the way that Malcolm discusses his relationship with her? Did you feel that Judith welcomed the suspicion that Malcolm was unfaithful, because it gave her license to hide her search for Willy?
Why do you think Judith goes to the trouble of getting sham identification cards made for “Edith W. Winks”? Have you ever been in a situation when you took a certain pleasure in your own anonymity—and the chance possibilities that came with it?
When he meets her, Willy calls Judith “muy peligrosa.” Is he right, that Judith is dangerous? Is he right in the way that she’s dangerous?
What do you think about the way that Judith and Willy originally part ways, when she leaves for college in California? What would you have done in her place? If you were Willy, would you have tried to follow her?
When Judith sees Willy again at his cabin by the lake, he is a much-changed man. What do you think of his transformation? How might things have turned out differently for Willy had Judith stayed in Nebraska?
Toward the end of the book, Judith stares out the car window at “a flat treeless landscape without interest except for the occasional antelope feeding in the day’s last light. Deer can jump fences, but antelope can’t, or won’t, she couldn’t remember which. Willy had told her, a long time ago. How it was a failing that often cost them their lives.” How does this work as a metaphor? Who is the antelope and who is the deer?
What was your reaction to Willy and Judith’s final scene? Why does Willy do what he does? How do you imagine Judith’s life a year after the book’s last page?
Also by Tom McNeal
Goodnight, Nebraska
For Young Adults
(cowritten with Laura Rhoton McNeal)
Crooked
Zipped
Crushed
The Dec
oding of Lana Morris
For Children
(cowritten with Laura Rhoton McNeal)
The Dog Who Lost His Bob
Praise for Tom McNeal’s
to be sung underwater
One of the Best Books of the Year
USA Today, Wall Street Journal,
Seattle Times, Booklist, Shelf Awareness
“To Be Sung Underwater is such an immensely readable novel. McNeal has the enviable talent of making splendid writing look easy at no cost to the complexity and the beauties of what fascinates him (and me)—the terrain occupied by women and men in love with each other. This is a wonderful book.”
—Richard Ford
“An exceptional novel…. Mr. McNeal writes a kind of prose that’s almost endangered today: natural, smooth, and subtle…. He produces one extraordinary sentence after another as he unspools two irresistible tales. If you despair of the vigor and grace of modern fiction, read this.”
—Cynthia Crossen, Wall Street Journal
“Love stories have a terrible gravity, a centrifugal force. McNeal has created characters so dimensional, so memorable, that we are caught up in that urgency. Our rationality is compromised; the rules of the world fade away. ‘This is your last chance, Judith, do you hear me?’ we shout at the flimsy pages. ‘Get yourself back to Rufus Sage, Nebraska, and fast! There’s not a moment to lose!’ ”
—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
“This lovely novel is quiet and smart, drawing you so deeply into the characters that the ending might just leave you coming up for air.”