Joan Silber

What do we need to be happy? Love? Money? Work? Family? Joan Silber takes on the question with her usual deft touch here, though without ever addressing it head on. Beginning with Ethan, a young Manhattan lawyer who discovers that his father has a second family, Silber unspools a web of lovers, siblings, parents, and children, from Greenwich Village to Bangkok, whose searches for fulfillment ripple outward in unexpected ways. From the entanglements of Ethan’s half brothers in Queens to his show more new boyfriend’s dying ex, whose sister watches them care for him warily even as she rekindles an old flame, to a young filmmaker living with her mother’s regrets and her sister’s capriciousness, each set of choices—infidelity, caretaking, the rejection of parents’ values and money, the work to build an extended family based on love and loyalty—affects the others in ways both subtle and large. Silber moves easily in and out of her characters’ heads; the novel is deceptively airy yet, given a reflective reading, has an ethical center without the shortcut of easy morality. show less

I loved this—delightful, a little profound but not obsessively so. Actually it made me think of Prezi—remember that, the presentation software that everybody wanted to play with a few years back because they were so sick of Powerpoint, how you could make it swoop in and out and go from macro to micro and back again? I hated Prezi, it made me dizzy. But this book is what Prezi wished it could be. Silber uses these beautiful little declarative sentences to paint a whole mural, and it's show more just neat how she does it—plus entertaining and very sweet. This is a morally decent novel and god knows we need more of those right now. show less

I read Joan Silber's amazing collection of interwoven stories, Ideas of Heaven, many years ago and feel in love with her writing. Since then, she has rarely disappointed, and her latest collection is no exception. Comprised of seven chapters, six narrators recount incidents from their lives. The narrators, in one way or another, have crossed paths, and as they tell their stories, the connections between them--some significant, some just passing--resonate, creating a community of which they show more may not even be aware. The first and last chapters are narrated by Ethan, a young gay man whose security was shattered when he learned that his father had a second family and other children. In between, the threads are picked up by one of those other children, by brothers and sisters, by past and present lovers, by distant acquaintances. It's a clever structure, but it also has a purpose

As each tells his or her story, we sense life's pain and disappointments, but there are moments of joy and epiphany as well, often coming in the midst of the most mundane circumstances. One of the things I loved most about Ideas of Heaven was the subtle spirituality beneath the surface, and I was left with the same feeling in reading Secrets of Happiness. I'm not a "spiritual" person in the usual sense. I'm not a churchgoer or a prayer or a believer in some big daddy in the sky who controls everything. I don't meditate or palm crystals or believe in reincarnation. This world, like it or not, is what we've got, but Silber lets us know that it's enough. And that may be the real secret of happiness.

The characters are wonderful, both people we feel we know and unique in their individuality. As usual, Silber's writing is carefully crafted, witty, insightful, subtle. There's a moment of surprise for me in each of the stories, a moment when, as I'm reading what seems to be a perfectly ordinary story, I'm stunned, stopped in my tracks. I'd say it was like being struck by a lightning bolt, but it's more like finding you've been sitting in the middle of a slow-moving flood that has suddenly risen above your head. Perhaps the word I used above is best: epiphany.

Silber's books always teach me a lot about the world we live in, and they always teach me a lot about myself. It's rare for me to finish a book and not only keep thinking about it but want to read it again, and soon. show less

I'm pretty much stunned that I actually finished up [[Joan Silber]]'s smart, no-nonsense writerly [The Art of Time in Fiction]. The subtitle cracks me up, - being 'As Long as It Takes' - I've been reading it about one chapter per month, which since there are six plus an intro. gives you some idea how long it's been knocking around my work area. I'm guessing that Silber gradually put these chapters together while teaching eager MFA students at various programs around the country. " Time draws show more the shapes of stories," writes Silber in her opening sentence. The first chapter investigates 'Classic Time' - 'alternating scene and summary'. In "Long Time" Silber talks about how writers can compress long periods of time into a few paragraphs or sentences, using one of my favorite passages of all time, the middle section of [To the Lighthouse] during the time, after Mrs. Ramsay's death, when the summer house stands empty except for a semi-annual visit from a local person to open the windows and sweep it out. "Switchback Time," shows how some stories are built by moving back and forth in time - [The Time of Our Singing] which I just finished recently is a powerful example of that approach. Then there is "Slowed Time" where every moment of it takes place in the present but the details are not trivial - Raymond Carver is a master of this. "Fabulous Time"- think Marquez, and all stories that go around and around and have the feel of being a little detached from regular time and yet true on a larger scale of human doings. Last "Time As Subject" - books and stories that take on the ruthlessness of time itself as a theme. I've not read much Denis Johnson, but Silber's description of one of his stories - of a person who can't stay focussed, can't keep track of time, forgets, made me interested in reading at least this one.
Silber's book is geared toward the widely read and the truly interested in writing as craft. For a new writer, her book might be useful as a heads up about the fact that the choices you make about how time passes (or doesn't) in a story matters . That it is one of the many pieces of the puzzle of putting a story together and telling it well, different stories may require different approaches. To the experienced writer, it will serve as a reminder and a comfort and maybe even as an inspiration. To the widely read non-writer it might be interesting as a window into the process. The stories and novels don't 'just happen' - the writer has to choose every aspect and even if many of the decisions happen intuitively; later, in revision all those must be examined and evaluated. It's a quiet book, not out to wow you or tell you what you should do, but to offer insights and modest commentary that illuminates how time is handled in fiction. I'm wavering between ***1/2 and ****. show less