‘Secrets of Happiness’ by Joan Silber   (2021) – 274 pages

‘Secrets of Happiness’ is filled with men and women and their always frenetic activities. All this signifies very little. The characters in these very loosely linked stories go to the far reaches of the world, usually far south eastern Asia, and get involved in myriad affairs, but nothing has any real impact.

As far as I am concerned, all the characters could have been named what’s-his-name or what’s-her-name. They were all quite interchangeable.

An insignificant peripheral character in a previous story becomes the main protagonist in the next story. This is a valid stance as every person’s existence is significant on its own terms. However each story is an accumulation of near arbitrary events and movements for these people without any underlying motive.

The novel is divided up into seven sections each from a different character’s perspective except that the first and last sections are from a character named Ethan’s point of view.

The title ‘Secrets of Happiness’ is supposed to be the unifying factor that turns these loosely linked stories into a novel. So what are the secrets of happiness? About the only guidance that I found in this novel is to follow your own proclivities. However there is a line of dialogue in the book that contradicts that advice:

“People think that if they are honest about their cravings, it makes anything OK,” I said. “That’s a fallacy of modern life.”

The onrush of incidents and forever more, more minor characters leaves no room for any real depth. All we are left with is a surface word-picture of frenetic activity and scattered casual acquaintances.

There were a couple of individual lines which I did enjoy in this “novel”:

“She’d been an English major in college, perfect preparation for not having a job,”

“My mama so poor the ducks threw bread at her.”

However, overall, I found this work off-putting. You can read the more favorable reviews of ‘Secrets of Happiness’ after you read mine. There are some out there.

Grade:    C-

‘Improvement’ by Joan Silber   (2017) – 256 pages

One of the more common forms of fiction today is the linked story novel.  This type of novel is made up of individual stories which are tied together by a town as in Elizabeth Strout’s ‘Olive Kitteridge’ or by an event such as the Vietnam War as in Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’ or by a workplace such as the newspaper office in Tom Rachman’s ‘The Imperfectionists’ or by a theme such as music in Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad’ or by some other unifying device.  ‘Improvement’ by Joan Silber is just such a novel of linked stories.

The stories in ‘Improvement’ range in locales from the country of Turkey to New York City to Virginia, and they range in time across forty years, so time and location are not the unifying factors.  I was quite impressed by a previous novel of linked stories by Joan Silber called ‘Fools’.  However this new novel ‘Improvement’ didn’t really work for me.  I will explain why.

In what are supposed to be connected stories, the connective tissue here seemed vague and almost random.  I could not see how the stories were connected at all, and for me they might better have been just separate stand-alone stories.  I suppose the author somehow felt they were all joined under the title theme of ‘Improvement’ but I couldn’t see how the stories even fit that title.  I did not really see any improvement in the characters’ lives, as for the most part they behave miserably and rather meaninglessly. The individual stories felt mundane and rather pointless to me

Between the various chapters the groups of characters are nearly unrelated.  Thus the novel doesn’t build up any energy or allow the reader to develop strong feelings for the characters. A number of the characters in the novel are black, and I felt that the author fell back on racial stereotypes to some extent in her depictions rather than developing fully well-rounded individuals.

The description of the scenes and the plots of the various stories are perfectly clear and capably done, but they didn’t lead anywhere.  I didn’t feel that this novel transcended its material as some novels do. It left me feeling rather blah, and I felt no compelling urge to return to the novel when I wasn’t reading it except to get through with it once and for all.

I realize this judgment is rather severe for an author that I have admired and praised in the past for her short stories.  When a fiction doesn’t work for me, it just doesn’t work.

Grade :    C+

‘Fools’ by Joan Silber  (2013) – 255 pages

Joan Silber is a writer who can make the people in her stories come vividly alive in just a few pages.  I discovered Silber a few years ago when I read her book “Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories” and since then I’ve been on the lookout for her fiction.

“Fools” is a story cycle, a group of lightly interconnected stories.  The first story concerns six friends living in Greenwich Village in the 1920s. The other stories relate to these six friends one way or another.

Joan Silber writes about people in the United States you seldom hear about.  These are people who feel a social responsibility for the people around them, people who believe their own personal happiness is related to the well-being of those who are less fortunate.  In this time of extreme personal greed, it is refreshing to read about folks who are actually concerned about the poor and the outsiders around them.

 “I do like life-stories. The deepest ironies are in those lurching shifts people make, bit by bit.”  Joan Silber, in an interview with The Millions.

 My favorite story here is “The Hanging Fruit”.  The story is told by a young guy whose parents run a hotel in Palm Beach in the early 1960s.  His romantic life becomes complicated, and one day he steals some money out of his parents’ safe at the hotel and runs off to Paris.  He wastes all his money on women and booze, and then his only means of getting any money is playing his clarinet in public places.   Later he sobers up and moves to New York and runs a halfway house for men coming out of prison.

 “His dating life had scared him about the risks of ending up with someone shrill or cloying or shallow or stupid.  I was at the very least none of those things.” 

 All the stories in “Fools” are rapid reads that cover a lot of ground quickly.   Each story is a wide panorama of life.  One might wish that each story had fewer characters, less activity, and a shorter time frame.  This would allow Joan Silber to go deeper into the individual characters and the separate issues raised by the plot.   As it is, the stories fly by in a whirlwind of people and activities leaving little lasting impression on the reader.