Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness by Jennifer Tseng

Alone with my secret, I indicted and rehabilitated, analyzed and haggled. I accused my self of rape, molestation, and willful negligence. Alternately, I defended my right to feel pleasure and love, my right to refuse loneliness. The accusing self and the accused self, though not identical, were like two images seen through binoculars. My vision was double. As I strained to make sense of the world I saw, to make sense of my own vision, the two selves moved closer to one another. They touched hands, their hips overlapped, their hearts lay astride one another like the folded wings of a red butterfly until at last the two merged into a single image, the single self that became the self I saw myself as.

Mayumi is a 41-year old librarian living on one of those islands in New England that are clogged with visitors in the summer and nearly empty in the winter. She has a five year-old daughter and a husband who spends most of his time whittling gnomes, and who is virtually a stranger to her. When a handsome young seventeen year-old appears in the library, she develops an intense fixation with him. It becomes the fodder for jokes with her coworkers, but Mayumi is serious: she sees that the "young man"--who's never given a name, for reasons that are later made clear--has eyes for her as well. She invites him on a hike, and then into an empty summer home, and the rest goes as you might imagine.

"Age gap discourse" being what it is these days, you have to admire the boldness of writing a book like Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness. Last week in my senior class we read Mary Robison's amazing story "Yours," about an old man and his younger wife who has terminal cancer, and it was very difficult for them to understand what might bring together even two people facing the final stages of their life. Mayumi resigns herself, if not quite embraces, her newfound status as a predator. (When, after weeks of sexual liaisons with the young man, she finally looks up the age of consent in Massachusetts, she's almost shocked to find it's only sixteen.)

It's easy to understand how Mayumi finds herself attracted to the young man, who is sensitive and intelligent in addition to being handsome. But he's not precocious; you don't find yourself excusing the impropriety of their relationship because he is an "old soul." It's a testament to Tseng's skill that the relationship is both understandable and entirely wrong. The book's pathos, in fact, comes largely from Mayumi's intense awareness that the young man's life is before him, while she lurches further into an unsatisfying middle age. She has more in common with the young man's mother, a local shop owner who befriends Mayumi over book recommendations; when Mayumi cheekily offers up a copy of Lolita it feels a little on-the-nose but inevitable, like the joke's long-awaited punchline.

I was impressed by the Mayumi's voice, which is just a shade over the line that separates erudition and pretension. We catch it, but even an intelligent seventeen year-old never would. He'd never see what a mature reader sees: the way the language of intelligence assuages an abiding loneliness. Mayumi is sometimes ridiculous, but never pitiable, and her slight pretensions only make her insights more powerful.

I haven't yet decided what I think of the ending, which I won't spoil. We expect everything to come crashing down around Mayumi, and it does, though not in the way we expect. Part of me felt that the way it does come crashing down is something of a dodge. Yet the late "twist" opens new avenues in the novel, transforming it into something new, or perhaps transmuting the quiet tragedy that was already there.