Improvement
Joan Silber
Allen & Unwin, £14.99
The Turkish rug adorning its cover is a none-too-subtle tip-off that Joan Silber’s eighth novel is an exploration of the threads that bind people together and the patterns woven by their actions. It’s made up of a number of interlinked stories, delving into the lives of characters separated in space and time who are all, in some way, connected. From the reader’s perspective, the narrative ripples outwards from single mother Reyna and her aunt Kiki in New York, and it begins in 2012, with Hurricane Sandy about to hit the city and Reyna needing a babysitter so that she can visit her boyfriend Boyd, who is serving a prison sentence for dealing a small amount of marijuana.
Boyd is the best boyfriend she’s had, a better man than the father of her son, but after his release he is still tempted to turn to crime, namely transporting tax-free cigarettes across state lines, despite Reyna’s pleas for him to go straight. The death of one of Reyna’s acquaintances in a car crash has effects far beyond her immediate circle, and Silber leaves New York for Virginia to show its impact on Darisse, another struggling single mother, as well as truck driver Teddy, who is having a long-distance affair with his ex-wife, which they both know can’t last forever.
All this time, aunt Kiki’s story has been waiting in the wings, and finally we go back to Istanbul in 1970, where Kiki married a Turkish rug-seller and lived with his family, the young woman from Brooklyn persevering with a hard farming life for several years. Why she left her husband and returned to America is something Reyna has never persuaded her to talk about, but Silber takes us back to Kiki’s fateful encounter with three young and foolish German smugglers of antiquities before following their lives for several chapters, eventually introducing us to the daughter of two of the smugglers, who is now herself living in New York.
By the time we catch up with Reyna again, we have a much richer understanding of her and the moral framework of her world, and her climactic attempt at redemption has a far greater resonance when seen in the context of the book as a whole.
Silber brings the skills of a short story writer to her novels, giving her characters enough space to breathe within the confines of the larger story, and every so often one will come across a jewel of a sentence that begs to be underlined or committed to memory. Her writing about relationships balances understanding and empathy with a refreshing lack of sentimentality. Above all, she conveys not only the interconnectedness and complexity of human lives, but how little of it we can see from our own perspective and how futile and arbitrary it can be to attempt to apportion blame or responsibility. If knowing the full consequences of our actions is beyond us, then acting with the best of intentions is the best we can do.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
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