Paul Eluard, the French poet and surrealist, once wrote, “There is another world, but it is inside this one.” This is a sentiment that most poets likely resonate with, as we—or at least I—are always seeking to find that inner world and bring it to the surface. The best literature has depths and layers to be plumbed, because it reflects the folds of reality that we navigate on a daily basis. The very best literature helps us learn to navigate these other, inner worlds in our real lives by allowing us to practice doing so in fiction. Jonathan Geltner’s Absolute Music is a novel that does this successfully, albeit inversely: he illustrates the danger inherent in delving too deeply into the other world through the story of a man who begins to destroy his connections to this one.

Absolute Music follows a novelist nicknamed McPhail as he finds himself stymied in his creative, personal, and professional life. In the midst of this slump, memories begin to surface of the sudden death of his childhood love, Hannah, and McPhail begins something like a quest to redeem that loss. He becomes increasingly haunted by Hannah. Versions of her name are borne by new people in his life. Events seem to be connected by dates that match the day of her death. He is drawn to places that lie on the same longitudinal line as their childhood hometown. He experiences a deeply intimate encounter with an adult version of her, although the question lingers as to whether this encounter was a dream or a vision. As McPhail follows these signs of Hannah, as he seeks out her story, his quest draws him further away from his living wife, his new child, and his friends that still remain. His obsession with redeeming a lost past endangers the present that he already has.

Literature lovers will recognize that Geltner draws deeply from Dante’s Divine Comedy in the weaving of his narrative. The novel begins with McPhail standing beneath honey locust trees, feeling lost in his own life and getting lost in the memory of these trees that figure in the day he learned of Hannah’s death. McPhail opens the chapter as if he is standing alone while contemplating the trees, similar to Dante’s awakening alone in the dark wood. It’s not until several paragraphs in that McPhail admits that he is not, in fact, alone: his wife is standing there next to him. Here, early in the story, McPhail has a choice—to follow his wife, who is never actually named in the novel but bears only the nickname Kew, or to follow the memory of Hannah. It quickly becomes clear that McPhail views Hannah as his figure of Beatrice, and so he pursues her with an increasingly single-minded focus.

As he begins to drift deeper into his pursuit of Hannah, the memory of a college friend, Joel Stein, appears. He seems, at first, to fill the role of Virgil. Early on, McPhail credits Joel as his primary encourager in the pursuit of higher learning, which is what leads him in turn to become a teacher and writer. McPhail feels the continued influence of Joel long after their friendship ceases, and he walks with Joel through a dream in which he wrestles with notions of story and reality and Joel’s relationship to his current quest for Hannah. McPhail follows the memory of Joel up through meeting and sleeping with Annette, the aforementioned young woman who bears a version of Hannah’s name.