HIGH DIVE

A middle-aged woman considers what constitutes infidelity in this debut novel.

As an award-winning photojournalist, Alex used to travel to war-torn parts of the globe to capture scenes of suffering, hoping to awaken the American public to problems that their government helped create. Now, she’s a 43-year-old mother of two who photographs family portraits in her Westchester, New York, studio. Her lawyer husband, Martin, tells people that she left her previous job because she decided “It was time for something new”; Berks, her fellow photojournalist and former lover, accuses her of selling out in exchange for stultifying suburban bliss. Alex knows that neither description tells the whole story, but she isn’t quite sure how to frame her own life. She doesn’t miss the danger of her past work, but she does miss its exhilaration and sense of purpose. When her glamorous older sister, Maggie, casually mentions that their late father had an affair and that she herself is sleeping with a married man, Alex feels something spark inside her. She resolves to capture the essence of extramarital affairs in photos, starting by taking covert pictures of Maggie and her boyfriend. But the project forces her to confront her motives as a photographer; maybe her new obsession with “cheating,” she thinks, is a function of her compulsion to “chas[e] after other people’s sadness.” A lesser novelist would draw clearer lines between career and motherhood, history and loyalty, desire and morality. Author Amon, however, effortlessly balances such seemingly conflicting truths. She shows how the topic of infidelity shadows Alex’s own marriage as well as her protagonist’s interactions with her siblings and mother. Each conversation carries rich undertones of unspoken emotional baggage; the scenes with Berks are particularly loaded, featuring frustration, romance, comfort, jealousy, and admiration within the span of a few paragraphs. Amon, in clean, polished prose, poses messy questions: How do you enjoy your version of happiness in a world full of misery? And how do you appreciate a person’s love for you when you see that his or her love for someone else is greater?

A layered and insightful exploration of how people seek meaning in careers and relationships.