N.B. This review is not spoiler-free. Character death and imprisonment are central to the book and, hence, the review.
Early on in Joan Silber’s Improvement (Counterpoint, 2017), our protagonist, a young woman named Reyna, remarks on her boyfriend Boyd’s ability to console his loved ones by divining the wry humor in their personal tribulations, an act of attention and care that allows them to link their private pain to “the ever-expanding joke of human trouble.” This well-turned phrase doubles as a fitting summary of Silber’s main thematic concern as a fiction writer, particularly in her recent story cycles Ideas of Heaven (W. W. Norton, 2004) and Fools (W. W. Norton, 2013), which move between protagonists and settings across space and time in order to dramatize the ways in which the consequences of human actions ripple outwards throughout seemingly unconnected lives.
Improvement, billed as a novel, is Silber’s most ambitious attempt to explore this theme. It is bookended by the first-person narration of Reyna, a young, single mother living in Harlem. Reyna is raising four-year-old Oliver with the help of her aunt Kiki, who once lived in Turkey with a rug-selling husband for eight years and has cultivated a reputation as the family’s eccentric. She provides Reyna with childcare and much-needed reality checks. Among their sites of conflict is Reyna’s relationship with Boyd, who has recently been released from Rikers Island after three months on a drug charge. Kiki is sympathetic to Boyd’s troubles but believes that Reyna needs to travel the world rather than settling down with him. Cognizant of this, Reyna doesn’t tell her about Boyd and his friends’ plan to smuggle cigarettes from Virginia to New York in order to profit from the tax difference, a plan that Reyna worries will threaten Boyd’s probation. The operation runs smoothly for a few months, improving everyone’s financial situation and bringing Boyd and Reyna closer than ever, but things come to a head when Boyd asks Reyna, an excellent driver with no record, if she’ll drive the car for the upcoming trip. At first, she agrees, but her last-minute change of heart leaves Boyd’s friend Claude the only available driver. When a car accident kills him and injures their friend Maxwell, Reyna is blamed and shut out of her old life, including her relationship with Boyd.
This opening section is rendered in clean, enticing prose and packed with quotable observations, a hallmark of Silber’s style: Reyna reflects on her habit of “imagined meetings with ex-lovers … on urgent last requests from their sickbeds,” fueled by a desire to “show up in tribute to the substance of what we trashed” and a fascination with “the last triumph of behaving well.” Social observations are equally pithy, and grounded in Reyna’s understanding of her complex role as a white woman in a Black community: “Speeding White Woman Stopped on Highway with Two Colored Fellows. Or was that just the old South?”
But the novel’s finest accomplishment is structural, as, after quickly documenting the aftermath of Reyna’s exile, the narrative begins to move, in third-person narration, through the lives of those affected by Reyna’s split-second decision. We encounter Darisse, Claude’s new girlfriend from Virginia who never learns of his death and can only imagine he has lost interest, and Teddy, the trucker who was the other party in the accident; their attempts to move on while juggling the preexisting complications of their lives—ex- and current lovers, difficult children, financial troubles—never feel forced or random.
Readers who enjoyed the witty Kiki as well as those who found her enigmatic will enjoy the chapter detailing her years in 1970s Turkey, which balances an exploration of Turkish politics and society with Kiki’s growing realization that she wants leave her husband, who has recently moved them to the farm where he grew up, and return home to America. A trio of German antiquities smugglers whose brief stay on the farm provides the catalyst for the prodigal Kiki’s return stars in the next chapter, and the distorting effect of money and greed on their lives mirrors the opening exploration of cigarette smuggling in a thoughtful and never heavy-handed way: “All this greed and fury, all this grasping, where would it ever get Steffi?” The next chapter brings us back to Reyna’s New York, as the daughter of two of the smugglers, Monica, deals with the failing health of her mother Steffi, her malcontent partner Julian, and her friend and eyebrow tech, Lynnette, who we recognize as the soon-to-be-bereaved sister of Claude, Boyd’s friend who dies in the auto accident. The final chapter sees Reyna sell an antique rug given to her by Kiki and anonymously bequeath the proceeds to Lynnette out of guilt for her role in Claude’s death. Lynnette believes that an ex-boyfriend sent the money, which doesn’t frustrate Reyna but instead helps her to see what the reader has come to understand throughout the course of the novel, that the way we make sense of what happens to us has just as much to do with our ability to navigate the world as the course of fate: “Look what love did, even if it hadn’t done it.”
While these manifold plotlines, and the links between them, may seem like a lot to keep track of, Silber’s well-honed ability to tell a cohesive narrative in thirty or so pages (she was a two-time National Book Award nominee for her story collections Ideas of Heaven and Fools) makes each story distinct, and her narration’s genuine interest in the lives of such disparate characters makes a heuristic case for Silber’s casual approach to life’s big questions—“Was that what happened to old love, it turned into floating opinions and overcharged facts?” Silber’s use of third person for the middle section keeps her strong, recognizable narrative voice from seeming artificially similar across the stories, thus enabling her to use this voice to her advantage, as the throughline it creates emphasizes both the links between her characters’ situations and the idiosyncrasies that make them unique individuals.
Indeed, Silber’s command of voice is one of her great strengths as a storyteller, and perhaps the one that’s easiest to misunderstand: she adopts a wry, colloquial diction for first- and third-person alike, turning phrases so unpretentious and true-to-life that they may deceive the reader into thinking the work must have been easy. But Silber’s command of the text is nothing if not careful, and the simplicity of her prose belies her mastery of narrative architecture. As in Ideas of Heaven and Fools, Silber distills time’s forward march into as little as one sentence when necessary, in the interest of exploring one of her oeuvre’s primary concerns: the problem of how “time draws the shapes of stories,” as she puts it in her 2009 recent craft book, The Art of Time in Fiction (Graywolf Press). She continues, “I’m interested in how fates roll out over many years and am drawn to write fiction that takes on the task of compressing whole lifetimes into short stories or chapters.” This is the great accomplishment of Silber’s work, and of Improvement in particular. Far from just being, as many reviewers have characterized it, an exploration of the “butterfly effect,” Silber asks us to consider not only the intersections of multiple lives but the ongoingness of life well after the crucial juncture, and the moments when her characters realize the paradox that their fates have been set in motion, in ways they can yet understand only obliquely: “We were making great vows without the trouble of having to live with each other,” Reyna reflects when she finally runs into Boyd again, near the novel’s end. “But we were making them, standing on high ground to look down at the passage of time, years unfolding in the mortal valley below us.”
Silber herself has particular incentive to explore “the mortal valley” of time: at 72, her long-underappreciated work has begun to attain a critical mass of critical purchase. Improvement was awarded both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, two of the most prestigious American fiction prizes; in 2020, her debut novel, Household Words, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, long a premier prize for first fiction, will turn 40. While her work has long been appreciated by literary insiders, it is this reviewer’s hope that the chorus for Improvement will cement her reputation as one of our finest fiction writers.
For her part, Silber, who I had the great good fortune to meet at her publisher’s booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival last month, was overjoyed at the reception of Improvement, gracious in the face of my star-struck babbling, and, most importantly, forthcoming about her next project, which will similarly tackle the vagaries of time in a composite story-novel form. Improvement’s many readers, myself included, are sure to be dazzled.