The novelist Joan Silber, a critical favourite in her native US, is almost unknown over here. Lorrie Moore and Sarah Waters are fans, and her eighth book of fiction, Improvement, arrives with two major awards and a Washington Post plaudit calling her “our country’s own Alice Munro”. That’s already quite a lot to live up to.
Improvement is a patchwork novel, quiet in its voice, ambitious in its design. Starting and ending with the story of Reyna, a single mother in Harlem, and her eccentric aunt Kiki, who’s returned to New York after many years in Turkey, it daisychains several related narratives into a rich and surprising whole. Bound by their mutual affection, Kiki worries about her niece’s latest man, Boyd, who’s on probation following a jail term. Involved in a cross-state tax scam selling cigarettes, Boyd asks a favour of Reyna – he needs a driver, and as she’s white is less subject to suspicion; what she decides will reverberate throughout the book.
This baton-passing narrative might be offputting to some: Reyna and Kiki have been fascinatingly set up only to be put on hold while another character takes centre stage. Yet such is Silber’s expertise that it requires no more than a paragraph, or even a couple of sentences, to involve us in the next one, and the next. A jilted young woman goes through heartache and emerges on the other side. A truck driver recovering from a traffic accident takes stock of a life torn between his wife and his ex. Kiki reappears in a mid-section flashback to the late 1970s, when as a Turkish farmer’s wife she once hosted a trio of Germans seeking shelter. Silber’s superb handling of time – that Alice Munro tribute isn’t wide of the mark – draws the disparate lives into a unity, and makes this compressed novel feel mysteriously capacious.
Its principal theme is the need to make amends. In one passage a woman tells her terrible mother that she wasn’t “that bad”. The mother is astonished: “Was that what she wanted, those words? You’d think she could have made a better job of it then. But people often wanted payment for what they’d only wished they’d done.” If “Atonement” hadn’t already been taken, it would have given the book a better title – the only improvement it needs.
• Improvement is published by Allen & Unwin (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
