Recommend: Yes<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s hard to pull off, a novel that takes us into a different character each chapter. Harder still, when all these characters interact with each other. Their connections can be intimate, or loose. It\u2019s a delicate balance. Even the master of the form, Jennifer Egan, failed in her latest novel Candy House<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Joan Silber\u2019s Secrets of Happiness <\/em>is a picture-perfect execution of this fragmented narrative style. There are only seven chapters, each one long enough to sink into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We start in the shoes of Ethan, who is exploring his father\u2019s second \u2013 hidden \u2013 family. There\u2019s a strange Thai woman and her sons (Ethan\u2019s step-brothers) and there\u2019s a divorce with Ethan\u2019s mum. There\u2019s a family unit that is disrupted. Not destroyed, mind you, but changed. Ethan\u2019s mum discovers solo global travel (\u201cPeople have to learn what\u2019s enough,\u201d my mother told us. \u201cYou know what they did in Iceland?\u201d \u201cNot Iceland again,\u201d my sister said. My mother was thinking once more about going off to see the northern lights, sometime in winter<\/em>.). Ethan\u2019s old, sick dad is cared for by his past Thai lover (Nok sometimes took him outside, on nice summer days, but he wasn\u2019t walking far<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Silber does this so nicely: exploring how life moves away from our own expectations. For Ethan, he has been cut loose from those he cares about. His father is dying and living with a different family. His mother is travelling and finding new hobbies. He tries to find comfort and predictability with his partner but his partner grows tired of him. But in the same chapter Silber also focuses on the personal release being experienced by Ethan\u2019s mother. In another world, she would have been caring for her ailing ex-husband, as homebound as him. In this world, the one where her husband had an elaborate affair while in Asia for business trips, she is single and free to tour the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My mother came back from Thailand at the end of August, after her full year away. Tony and I picked her up at the airport. She was dressed like the proverbial backpacker my sister said she was, in sandals and jeans, beads around her neck. She\u2019d gotten a good settlement in the divorce, but you never would\u2019ve known. \u201cHello, you two!\u201d she said, throwing her arms around both of us at once. \u201cI\u2019m so glad to see you!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n And then in the next chapter we shift gears to a different set of characters, somewhat tied to a previous chapter and equally as detailed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite all this change in perspective, the writing is not too fast. It\u2019s a calming journey that starts with a family saga (Ethan\u2019s fracturing family) and then winds away from that drama and into new stories. Structurally it is more A Visit From the Goon Squad<\/em> than Intermezzo<\/em>. We spend less time with each character but visit more people, some of which are only very loosely related to previous characters. Pieces of one person\u2019s story are picked up from another character\u2019s perspective in a later chapter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are unifying themes that tie together the chapters. Money is always present. There is a near constant balancing of books of who owes who what: financially and emotionally. An alternate title for the novel could have been \u201cPrice of Happiness\u201d. The country of Thailand also appears regularly in chapters. I personally found this a very pleasing setting. It\u2019s an elusive escape from everyday relationships. It\u2019s the right amount of isolation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A criticism I have of Secrets of Happiness<\/em> is that the tone across the chapters is too homogeneous. Joe\u2019s chapter and Ethan\u2019s chapter have pretty much the exact same narration. I think this is a product of the traditional writing style. There are no experimental breaks, so it ends up blending together a little even though it\u2019s clear that the different perspectives are the novel\u2019s distinctive feature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Silber gets a lot of leeway though because the characterisation is highly skilled, even if the writing style is a bit samey. One character, Saul, has cancer and Silber affords him little sympathy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now it was Saul\u2019s turn to be a total pill. He talked too much about his different kinds of chemo; he talked too much about his white blood cells. Once he had been happy to argue about how detective novels were good for the brains of middle school kids and why online reading was a triumph against capitalisim. Now he was like any patient, caught up in the drama of his own ordeals, his schedule of medications, the textures of his shrinking world. I wanted him to be better than that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n And then there\u2019s this great line about cheating that juxtaposes the teenager, Nadia, with her older friend, Rachel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nadia liked to ask if I could game the system \u2013 get billions paid out insurance for someone who was healthy \u2013 but I had to tell her that was beyond me. Nadia had a youthful attitude about the possibilities of cheating.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Later, we meet Bud who is in his early twenties and lightly estranged from his family. In one sentence Silber tells us a lot about his upbringing and his reluctance to go back home. A feat of economical writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I thought about my father\u2019s fury and the little he ever got from it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Silber is just a fantastic writer. Most of the writing is very clean. Occasionally, she plays around with grammar, and that too is a joy. Here is an example from Bud\u2019s chapter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I hated her, I noticed. A growing outrage was coursing hotly under my skin. I could not believe the sheer effrontery of her. Life is full of surprises.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Here Silber slides in hot emotional words (\u201cHated\u201d; \u201cCoursing\u201d; \u201cEffrontery\u201d<\/em>) with more banal, off the cuff recounting (\u201cI noticed; \u201cI could not believe\u201d<\/em>). Finishing off with a blunt clich\u00e9 after some great writing (\u201cLife is full of surprises\u201d<\/em>) is a little tongue-in-cheek treat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A particular lightness of touch is the long distance friendship between Bud and Rachel. It is only mentioned now and then but is always charming, with just the right amount of ‘what could have been in a different life’. You can just about hear the figs falling, rotting, from Slyvia Plath’s metaphoric tree. As assessed from Rachel\u2019s perspective, there is a very melancholic edge to this relationship (\u201cHow far away he was. What did it mean to have a romance that was never going to be acted out?\u201d<\/em>). And then this beautiful moment from Bud\u2019s chapter while he is in Cambodia, where he clings to a dream about what the two could be in a different context:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was moved to tell this story to Rachel the next time we were having a conversation on Skype. Telling made me come up with lots of details. \u201cWhat a hoodlum,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m sorry I didn\u2019t know you then.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Definitely one of the better things anyone ever said to me. I was holding on to it, trying to keep the way she said it, while I took one of my walks at the end of the day. I was going along the riverbank, around to the spot where the Tonle Sap met the Mekong, as I waited for the air to turn cooler. The water was calm and silvery, and as the sky went from pinkish mist to gray dusk, the lights came on along the tourist boat.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n If Anne Tyler had met Tessa Hadley and Jennifer Egan for a glass of Riesling over lunch, they would have struggled to come up with a better novel. Secrets of Happiness<\/em> was a pure delight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The world, with all its wild shifts and flaring upheavels, was not a changeable planet to her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":824,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books","category-recommended_cait"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=822"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":869,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions\/869"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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