{"id":6552,"date":"2018-04-13T12:05:57","date_gmt":"2018-04-13T16:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=6552"},"modified":"2018-04-13T12:05:57","modified_gmt":"2018-04-13T16:05:57","slug":"improvement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2018\/04\/13\/improvement\/","title":{"rendered":"Improvement."},"content":{"rendered":"

Joan Silber won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction last year for her novel Improvement<\/a><\/em>, a slim, fast-moving work of interconnected short stories that reminded me in many ways of the work of Ann Patchett, especially her books Bel Canto<\/a><\/em> (a top 50 all-time novel for me) and Commonwealth<\/a><\/em>, where a single event sets off a series of waves in multiple directions that alter the lives of several characters. The kiss of Commonwealth<\/em> is here a decision not to go on a trip, which triggers enormous changes in the lives of at least a half-dozen people, leaving most of them better off, with at least one large exception, even though they may not even realize what happened to cause this.<\/p>\n

Reyna is a young single mother whose boyfriend, Boyd, is in prison on Rikers Island on a marijuana charge; he\u2019s black, she\u2019s not, but this doesn\u2019t seem to be an issue for anyone significant in the book except perhaps Boyd\u2019s ex-girlfriend Lynette. Boyd gets out of prison, after which he and his genius (note: not actual geniuses) friends cook up a plan to smuggle cigarettes from low-tax Virginia to high-tax New York and sell them at a decent profit. This involves regular trips from the city to Richmond to buy the goods, complicated by the fact that, like a lot of lifelong NYC residents, most of these nitwits either can\u2019t drive or can\u2019t do it very well, with Boyd and one other member of the group also prohibited from driving or leaving the state due to their prior convictions. When the one group member capable of driving the truck doesn\u2019t show for a scheduled run, Boyd & company try to press Reyna into doing it, but at the last second, she backs out, the novel\u2019s Big Bang moment that changes so many lives in the book.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Silber\u2019s strength here, which is one of Patchett\u2019s as well, is her development of a diverse group of characters who sometimes have the most tenuous of connections but are still clearly populating the same world. We begin with Reyna and her eccentric aunt Kiki, who was once married to a Turkish man and lived in Istanbul and later on a farm near Ankara, but fan outward from there, even landing in Richmond to visit the girlfriend of Claude, one of the nitwits, who doesn\u2019t know why Claude has stood her up; later the narrative returns to New York to Lynette, Claude\u2019s sister, a cosmetologist who plans to open up her own shop with the money Claude makes from the scheme. One chapter flashes back to Kiki\u2019s time in Turkey, when a trio of German tourists who are busy stealing artifacts from Turkish dig sites stops by her farm, a story that takes on greater significance later in the book.<\/p>\n

Patchett\u2019s best books – I\u2019d include State Of Wonder<\/a><\/em> in that list for sure, and would hear arguments for The Magician\u2019s Assistant<\/a><\/em> – all have some greater theme or illuminate something about human nature, but I don\u2019t know if Silber did that here. I enjoyed the time I spent with these characters, and the development of those is the novel\u2019s strength, yet the story is more interesting than insightful – it\u2019s Ray Bradbury\u2019s \u201cA Sound of Thunder\u201d set in Manhattan, without the sci-fi element, but Silber uses the same one-detail starting point to set the galaxies of her universe in motion. I\u2019m not sure how this won the NBCC award even just considering the few other 2017 novels I\u2019ve read so far.<\/p>\n

Next up: One of the finalists for the NBCC award last year, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness<\/a><\/em>, by Arundhati Roy, who won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joan Silber won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction last year for her novel Improvement, a slim, fast-moving work of interconnected short stories that reminded me in many ways of the work of Ann Patchett, especially her books Bel Canto (a top 50 all-time novel for me) and Commonwealth, where a single event […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[998,36,684,892],"class_list":["post-6552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2017-novels","tag-american-literature","tag-contemporary-novels","tag-national-book-critics-circle-award","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6552"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6554,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6552\/revisions\/6554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}