Book Review: The Stuff That Never Happened

Ah, Valentine's Day. It conjures up images of flowers, chocolates, romantic candlelight dinners, and happily ever after endings. But anyone who has been in a relationship for some time knows that love isn't always the stuff of fairy tales. Fraught with challenges and compromise, the merits of a mature love are often best observed when looking back over the hundreds of ups and downs of life that have been lived through and taken on together.

Connecticut author Maddie Dawson's debut novel The Stuff That Never Happened (Crown Publishing, 336 pages) is just that kind of mature love story.

Everyone in Annabelle and Grant McKay's small, quaint New Hampshire town where they've lived and raised a family for the past 26 years think the couple  has the most idyllic marriage. The faculty wives at the community college where Grant is a labor historian envy Annabelle for having the world's most devoted husband. As a friend pointedly tells Annabelle, they can always count on Grant to stand off to the side at parties and "chat about labor statistics all night long, and not once get drunk and go off dancing with any of the other women."

But no one knows anything about the first two years of Annabelle and Grant's 28-year marriage. Polar opposites in more ways than one, the two met at a college party when Annabelle was 20 and an art student the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her parents were in the first throes of a separation that would ultimately end in divorce and the upheaval at home resulted in her hastily accepting Grant's proposal of marriage.

Offered a coveted teaching position at Columbia University and invited to live temporarily with Grant's boss Jeremiah and his wife and young twins, the two honeymooned by pulling a U-Haul across the country, sleeping in unromantic campgrounds with chain link fences and grabbing quick bites in nondescript diners along the way.  For Annabelle, who was already experiencing some serious doubts, it was not the best way to start a marriage.

Then in New York, as Grant threw himself full tilt into his new position, Annabelle, feeling miserable and with no direction, threw herself into a passionate but reckless affair with Jeremiah. At Jeremiah's urging, the two agreed to confess to their respective spouses and run off together, but on the fateful night of reckoning only one of them--Annabelle--summoned the courage to follow through. 

The affair over and Annabelle and Grant's marriage in ruins, the two eventually agreed to reconcile, with one caveat from Grant--that they leave New York, move to his family home in New Hampshire to start over, and never speak of the painful episode in their marriage again. It would be the Stuff That Never Happened.

But while it may be possible not to speak of painful things, Annabelle has had 26 years to learn that it is much more difficult to stop thinking about them.  While she may not have seen Jeremiah since the night he stood her up, he remains a regular part of her dreams, her heart always questioning the life that might have been.

When a family health emergency involving Annabelle and Grant's daughter Sophie requires Annabelle's return to Manhattan to care for their daughter, the old memories bubble to the surface. And Annabelle runs head on into her past.

Told from Annabelle's point of view and building suspense by moving deftly back and forth between present time and the late 1970's when Annabelle and Grant first meet, Dawson both nails the banalities that marriages can often descend into while also holding up for admiration the qualities of a staid and true partner.

The Stuff That Never Happened isn't all hearts and flowers, but in true Valentine's Day fashion, it ends on a happy note.