Mercy, by Joan Silber, Counterpoint, 256 pp, $27, ISBN: 978-1640097070
There are some writers whose stories make you feel as if you are gently rafting down a river, watching the scenery drift by. Penelope Fitzgerald. William Maxwell. Tessa Hadley. The journey is seemingly effortless, the landscape deceptively typical. Until you pay careful attention. Until you sense beneath the smooth flow of unadorned prose and ordinary experience a subtle and enduring laying bare of what is most important in life, a revelation of essential verities best explored in realistic fiction.
Joan Silber is such a writer. When you start one of her stories, you are immediately engaged by a first-person voice that is relaxed and intimate:
My daughter knew me as the father who met any news by announcing, ‘We’ll deal with it.’ She understood this (correctly) to mean I’d seen bigger trouble than whatever the pissy little thing at hand was.
The voice might be this fifty-something dad (the opening of her new book, Mercy), a ten-year-old girl, a Thai street kid or a dying woman. The setting could be Bangkok, Istanbul, Paris or New York City. Ranging across continents and generations, Silber’s books create an expansive world filled with women and men who start off desiring the wrong things and go on to endure life’s minor absurdities and major crises with misplaced hopes and mismanaged expectations. But they are invariably familiar, and we warm to them, we hang with them as they suffer and grow, and by the end of each story, when they have left this life or remain, blessed (sometimes) with wisdom, we embrace them as if they were family.
Silber’s touch is light but her subjects couldn’t be more weighty: love and sex, illness and death, money and happiness, betrayal and forgiveness. Always her books are a sheer pleasure. Her illusory artlessness and narrative prowess make her both easy to read and well worth revisiting. Her deftness and mastery have led Nick Hornby to call her a ‘guiding star’ to other writers. Since the appearance of Household Words forty-five years ago, she has published ten works of fiction that explore family dramas with a unique narrative aesthetic she has refined to perfection. She is, as Charles Finch has described her, ‘America’s Alice Munro’, a storyteller whose manipulation of fictive time and space is artfully simple and magically deep.
I say ‘works of fiction’ because it is not entirely accurate to refer to Silber’s mature output as either novels or story collections. Mercy, like The Size of the World (2008), Improvement (2017), and Secrets of Happiness (2021), has ‘a novel’ genre designation on its cover. Ideas of Heaven (2005) and Fools (2013) are designated stories. Yet all six feel structurally similar, and how they are labelled doesn’t affect our enjoyment or critical assessment of them. Each book is a series of separate but linked narratives, a ring of stories where the main character in one appears as minor in others, and where lives and settings criss-cross in ways that feel both carefully planned and convincingly coincidental. The reader is twice blest: Silber’s method provides both the precision and intensity of a short story, chapter by chapter, and the immersive, cumulative satisfaction of a novel.
When I had the chance recently to interview Silber about her career and her new book, I began by asking her about this structural choice, and how she viewed her chosen genre:
When people ask me if I’m working on a novel or a group of stories, I always say, ‘Oh, you know – it’s that form I always use.’ I’ve often wished I could come up with a term for it. I do regard these last six books as basically the same in form. The Size of the World was listed as a novel in the contract, so I thought of that as I worked, and the last three books have just been called novels, without too much discussion. I’m very glad to know that your reading of them isn’t affected by the label. One advantage of writing over a long time (it’s more than twenty years now) is that people don’t think I’m doing this by mistake.
Mercy unfolds in six chapters, six voices. Ivan, the first narrator, is an ex-junkie who begins the book by reflecting on past mistakes. ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ his daughter asks him late one night. He refuses to tell her, but the question prompts a narrative shift to his youth, when he and his pal Eddie travelled the world, looking for adventure and the best drugs. That worst thing is soon revealed, a complex and unresolved betrayal that supplies the novel with a core event around which the themes of mercy and reformation are deeply and sensitively explored.
Ivan’s sin involves Eddie’s girlfriend at the time, Ginger/Astrid, whose voice comes next. Eddie’s story will close the book, but in between Silber offers us three closely related narratives: from Cara, her lifelong friend Nini, and Cara’s daughter Isabel. Cara’s link with Ivan and Eddie is incidental – a childhood accident lands her in the hospital when Eddie is there after overdosing – but the plot connection, though intricate and nicely worked out, is less important than the thematic bond. Each narrator makes mistakes. All face tragedy, in their own lives or in those they love or have loved, and these crises help them, as Nini puts it, ‘to rise out of [their] trivial and cherished vanities’ and to forgive or seek forgiveness.
Silber’s method gives immense breadth to her recurring themes. What could be confusing or desultory in the hands of a less gifted writer is a great strength in her fiction. Each character is singular. Each point of view is unique. Her characters sound different. When I asked her how difficult it was crafting distinctive voices in books with so many separate narrators, she said:
I love having different narrators. I’ve often quoted my mother saying, ‘You’re not the only pebble on the beach’ – a saying I hated at the time – to explain my fondness for trying to get in more pebbles. It allows me to work on an intimate scale but have a larger canvas. I do try to work on the voices being different. I think of myself as transcribing characters’ thoughts rather than mimicking speech.
Her distinction between thought and speech is important. First-person fiction works best when the unfiltered subjectivity and utter privacy of thought are primary, but conveyed with language that imitates oral storytelling. Silber gets this balance just right, so that her stories have the psychological depth of interior monologue and the intimacy and cadence of casual conversation. As the critic Ron Charles has put it, Silber’s stories ‘unfurl with such verbal verisimilitude that they’re like late-night phone calls from old friends’.
When I write fiction, I struggle mightily with the architecture of plot, the development of character, and the challenge of maintaining suspension of disbelief. Novelists must contend with the complexities of a lengthy narrative over a long period of composition (usually many years), planning carefully while striving not to make the story read as if planned. Silber’s dominant narrative mode is so replete, so extensively populated with principal characters and far-flung places, that I had to ask her how she kept her perspective during the planning and writing process.
‘The first chapter,’ she told me,
always comes to me as a story (usually with some degree of drama in it) and then I begin to think about what ideas are buried in it and how they might appear in other situations with other characters. I really do not plan the plot connections; they’re invented as I’m writing. It’s a trial-and-error process, with things discarded along the way and considerable effort in developing ideas fully enough. In this book – Mercy – I did know I wanted the fate of Eddie, the betrayed character, to be something of a mystery, and I wanted to return to it in the end. I do try for endings that hearken back to the beginning. But compared to most novel writers, I work in a very unplanned way. I think a lot of writers know the plot and have to discover what it means, and I’m sort of the opposite.
Buried ideas and how they might reappear – this is key to Silber’s art. Her principal focus is meaning, which unifies her multifarious voices and settings. Though her themes are easily expressed in a single word – mercy, happiness, difference, release – the way they unfold in narrative is intricate and moving. They are the themes of an sanguine writer who thinks well of humanity yet pulls no punches when describing her characters’ flaws. Her stories are full of wrong-headedness, deception, and rancour, but the arc of meaning is toward freedom and acceptance.
Often it is the reader who is encouraged to accept. In Secrets of Happiness, one of the main characters, Gil, leads a double life, maintaining two families in the same city. The revelation of his secret, so shocking and disruptive to his wives and children, drives most of the book’s seven first-person chapters. But Gil’s voice is not among them. By focusing on the victims of his actions, and examining how shock and disorder are gradually replaced by healing and joy, Silber nudges the reader away from censure, and we end up seeing this unpleasant, money-driven man – who remains unrepentant – almost sympathetically.
Silber’s books are full of such bad behaviour. ‘I wanted to do the wrong thing,’ says the vivacious Elisa in the early novel Lucky Us (2001). And wrong things she does aplenty. After discovering she is HIV positive, she abandons her partner, Gabe, a man who loves her deeply, for an abusive ex (also HIV positive) who in turn abandons her. But eventually she returns to Gabe and together they opt for a future based on what they have rather than what they think they want. Near the end of the novel, Silber gives Elisa this wonderful observation:
We would be happy, but in a ruined way, in an abandoned way. In this abandon, we would be freer, loosened from our smaller-minded attachments, and some things would be easier. Some.
How resonant is that repeated ‘some’. How poignant the tilt in meaning of ‘abandon’. These sentences are casual conversation raised to the level of poetry. And how earned is Elisa’s wisdom as she moves into a stage of life that offers, instead of adventure and escape, the richness of love and forgiveness.
Here is what Silber told me about her flawed characters:
When I studied writing with Grace Paley in college, her first assignment was to write in the voice of a real-life person you were not in sympathy with. (I used a friend of my brother’s, a reckless teenage driver who’d killed a pedestrian.) In my book Ideas of Heaven, Duncan is the villain of one story and the suffering mortal in another. (An ex-student just wrote me that the form I use, with its separate parts, allows me to be ‘generous’ and I liked hearing that). I used to tell students, ‘No trouble, no story,’ and I certainly think bad behaviour is essential for fiction. It may be a little unusual to hear directly from the perpetrators. I like to see characters rise above themselves – I want to trace that.
Soon after beginning her remarkable sequence of book-length ringed stories, Silber laid the theoretical groundwork for her technique in a short critical work, The Art of Time in Fiction (2009). A story, she says in the book’s introduction, ‘is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate’. Using examples from Tolstoy and Woolf to Denis Johnson and Alice Munro, Silber examines how great writers manipulate time to create an ‘angle of retrospect’ on the chaotic swirl of life and thus give meaning and intelligibility to the often baffling sequences of experience. The magic lies in how they do it, and they do it, Silber tells us, in different ways.
Readers can keep up just fine with a pace of shorter scenes, and lots of such scenes, and can accept the illusion of whole lifetimes passing as readily as they accept the illusion of a season or a year in a novel.
Narrative, she says, ‘always has time itself as an element of its subject matter’. Silber’s short scenes and discrete chapters manage time so skilfully that the illusion of many lifetimes passing happens without the reader missing a beat. We accompany the six narrators in Mercy as they move from decade to decade, partner to partner, continent to continent. Characters we meet as children reach old age. They leave New York and move to Bali or Bangkok. They fool around, they marry, they divorce, they die. Because of her ability to encompass such spans, Silber can explore not just the long-view development of individual lives but also generational conflicts, broad differences in culture, and historical shifts in social mores. And of course with the passage of time come not just life’s highs and lows but the end all of us, if not all characters, must face.
The life of the body and its inevitable fate figure prominently in all Silber’s books. Every chapter in Mercy revolves around a death. Speaking of the novel when it was a work in progress, Silber told The New Yorker that ‘the mystery of the body is also the mystery of its dissolution, its impermanence … I’m seeing, as I go, characters’ various ways of walking into the presence of death.’
I asked her to expand on this theme.
I did want the presence of death to be in this book; it’s a novel written in my later years. In fact, there have always been deaths in my books; in my own real life, my father died when I was five and my mother when I was twenty-six, so an awareness of that possibility is always with me. When I wrote The Art of Time in Fiction, I quoted Hemingway’s famous line about all stories ending in death and his comment that ‘he is no true story-teller who would keep that from you’. As I said then, it’s the nature of narrative to depict time passing – one thing happens after another – and I think fiction is also about the unstoppability of time, about what Buddhists call impermanence.
Her reference to Buddhism is not casual – Silber has had an active interest in the religion for thirty years; it affects her views and, as she puts it, ‘the conclusions I wish on my characters’.
For a long time I felt that I had religious impulses I didn’t know what to do with, and reading about Buddhism was hugely important to me. As an outsider I took the parts that spoke most to me – the idea that suffering comes from ego-craving and that grasping is doomed by impermanence. Knowing this is freeing (and requires effort): that’s the big claim (as I saw it, anyway). The struggle for me was how to get this into my writing without being mawkish. I kept it close to my characters – they have their own encounters with ideas.
Part of that closeness is her choice of settings. Her characters encounter ideas not just in their relationships but in their travels. Silber is a New Yorker, and the city is her base, in life and in fiction, but she loves placing her characters in locations that challenge their sense of self and the assumptions of their native culture. In Secrets of Happiness, when Gil’s first wife, Abby, discovers his deception, she moves to Thailand, where she lives for a year, ‘taking charge of her fate’ and finding ‘a way not to be bitter’. As Silber likes to point out, non-Western cultures have different notions of natural order and different concepts of time. ‘Of course, we’re on a different clock here,’ Abby explains to her son in an email. Or as another character in the novel says of a visit to the Philippines, ‘I was in another time zone of history.’
This metaphorical time zone accounts for differences in perspective that allow her characters – and her readers – to remove the blinkers of their usual time and place. ‘I’m an enemy of what I’d call parochialism,’ Silber has said. ‘Parochialism is the idea that the way you do it is the way it’s done. That’s very dangerous as a policy and as a human response to things.’ For her and for her characters, travel (as opposed to tourism) is a way to escape the narrowness of cultural habit.
My first trip to Asia was to China in 2001, and I developed an immediate secret wish to see as much of the continent as I could. By the end of 2002, I had made my way to Laos, which is still one of my favourite places. I kept coming back to Southeast Asia – to Thailand (several times), Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Singapore. In later years I returned for brief stints as a volunteer teacher of English in Laos (Luang Prabang) and in Thailand (Chiang Mai). Some of the students in both places were novice Buddhist monks – it was amazing be so close to their world.
This breadth of interest in other cultures gives Silber’s novels a global reach that is very satisfying. She takes us to these places not just in her descriptions but in the way her characters struggle and grow in such different environments, whether it is rural Turkey (Improvement), wartime Vietnam (The Size of the World), or a village in China (Ideas of Heaven). In Mercy, Nini is an anthropologist who does fieldwork among the Mien people of northern Thailand. Her experiences there are among the most fascinating passages in the novel, full of colour and mystery and the odd and often humorous shifts in outlook that occur when contrasting cultures bump against each other.
‘One of the things I loved about ethnography,’ Nini says at one point, ‘was that you got to read constantly about sex and death. The same all over the world but different, different.’ Nini’s profession and her travels give her distance, and Silber uses this distance to explore habits and norms closer to home – not just sex and death, but money, happiness, friendship, and spiritual choice. Near the end of Ideas of Heaven, Silber has a character conclude:
I could see that sex and religion were always fighting over the same ground – both with their sweeping claims, their promises of transport – and each ran into the breach left by the other, each tried to fill in for the other’s failings. Forms of devotion, forms of consolation.
Those forms change across time and space. ‘Sexual behaviour was always a social construct,’ Nini tells Cara, an idea we see explored chapter by chapter and narrator by narrator in Mercy. Nini and Cara we meet as ten-year-old girls and follow their lives through their teens, young adulthood, maturity and old age. Through their voices we meet their boyfriends, girlfriends, and partners. We learn of their small betrayals; their different attitudes to sex; the consolation they seek, when relationships fail, from travel, altruism or religion. Their characters are given further perspective by the chapter that follows, in the voice of Isabel, Cara’s daughter, who views her mother with exasperation and affection. Isabel and her sister Elena grapple with the age-old social constructs differently, contemplate other modes of escape. Isabel finds it ‘very hard to imagine how men and women have ever gotten along’ and dreams of getting off the grid and moving to a cabin in Wyoming. But like her mother and most Silber characters, she is also negotiating, ‘the comic tyrannies of the body, their ungainliness and majesty’.
Bracketing the voices of these women are the stories of the two men, Ivan and Eddie, whose own relationship gets fractured so profoundly they never see each other after Ivan’s early betrayal. But they remain on each other’s minds for the rest of their lives, dogged by guilt, memory and curiosity, and their stories conclude with regretful, yearning sentences that strike a deep chord in the reader and echo the novel’s title. ‘I left my friend behind, as if I’d forgotten where he was,’ Ivan says. ‘I wanted to tell him every day that I remembered.’ And Eddie, aware of Ivan’s betrayal, thinks, ‘Where was there ever enough mercy? Nowhere on the planet.’
There is never enough mercy because there is no end to the foolishness and vanity of human beings, but that has not stopped Silber from offering her characters (and her readers) consolations for the challenges they face across the eventful lifetimes she gives them. ‘Verities have to be earned,’ William Kittredge has eloquently written, ‘and they take time in the earning.’ Silber’s command of fictive time and her sympathy for her creations make those consolations deeply meaningful, endowing her books with a depth that keeps them in our thoughts long after we have read them.
Mercy’s ending is wonderful – and unusual. It is the only chapter in the book in the third person. For reasons I won’t spoil, we forget about Eddie after Ivan’s opening chapter, so it made sense for Silber, she told me, to present him in the third person – he’d been a figure outside the action for so long. This shift in point of view allows her to get inside Eddie’s head while maintaining a narrative distance that suits the novel’s reflective ending. We are very much with Eddie, but at key moments the narrator moves beyond him:
The thing about being young was, you didn’t know what lay ahead … Much of Eddie’s own life felt like that, a botched and risky present that the future dragged into a pattern.
The passage of time, what we want and expect, what the future delivers – this complex flow of desire and event provides an angle of retrospect, for Eddie and for the reader. And these sentences strike me as as good a way as any of describing Silber’s art. Her own lifetime (or one version of it anyway) is narrated by the ten works of fiction she has published, by the way she has dragged the details of her characters’ lives into patterns that enrich and enlighten and do what Kittredge says all good stories must do – talk out the trouble in our lives and make sense of what is valuable in the world.
1/10/2025
Kevin Stevens is a novelist and critic and divides his time between Dublin and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
