Improvement.
Joan Silber.
Atlantic. 2019. 227 pp.
ISBN 978 0 76063 726 2.
Joan Silber's Improvement achieves this beautifully. There is no consistent, clear, linear story. Instead, there are lives linked by events, objects, relationships and casual encounters. Her characters reveal themselves through their thoughts, opinions, and actions. Sometimes they speak for themselves; at other times the author is in control and describes their thoughts and feelings. All of Silber's people come alive through their actions and idiosyncrasies, and all are completely believable characters.
We meet Reyna first, and she appears at regular intervals throughout the book. She is a young, white, single mother living in Manhattan with her small son, Oliver. Her boyfriend, Boyd (not Oliver's father, although Oliver clearly adores him), is black and on remand from Rykers Island penal institution: "I'd gone to see him once a week," Reyna tells us. "He was there for selling five ounces of weed (who thinks that should even be a crime?)." And at one point she describes the humiliating visiting rituals, the searches, the rules: "You couldn't wear anything too revealing—no rips or see-through... Visitors must wear undergarments."
Boyd clearly loves Reyna and Oliver, but things change quickly when Boyd's friends begin to make money by running illegal cigarettes from Virginia to sell on the black market in Manhattan. Reyna's decision not to get involved has disastrous consequences for Boyd's friends and for her.
Meanwhile, we meet Reyna's older aunt, Kiki, whose "hippy" style elopement from Istanbul with a Muslim Turkish carpet-seller, and then her return to the USA eight years later, intrigues Reyna. "Kiki had never been a practicing Muslim but she liked a lot of it," Reyna tells us. Kiki's family was from "a forward-thinking, leftish strain" of Jews so "no-one had any objections to her Turkish boy-friend." But when her boy-friend moved back to his home village to help his father raise pumpkins for their seed oil, and Kiki wrote to tell her family she was getting married, "They were surprised about that part. Were they invited to the wedding? Apparently not. In fact it had already happened by the time they go the letter."
"Kiki was always like a bird," says Rayna's father, who is Kiki's brother. "Flying here and there." "What a corny thing to say," thinks Rayna, but her own meetings and conversations with Kiki reveal much about both of them. Kiki, Reyna says, "used to try to get me to read this unreadable guy Averroes and also another one, Avicenna. Only my aunt would think someone like me could just dip into twelfth-century philosophy if I felt like it. She saw no reason why not."
But we also learn from the author about Kiki's life on a Turkish farm, and her experiences of being part of a Turkish family. Kiki speaks a little Turkish: no-one but her husband speaks English. "I know it is hard for you to imagine," Kiki writes to her family after they have sent her wedding presents including "a microwave oven, a Mister Coffee, an electric blanket for the cold mountains"..."but we do very well without electricity. Every morning I make a wood fire in the stove. Very good-smelling smoke. I make a little fire at the bottom of the water-heater, too." Yet we learn that the Turkish family scolded her "about the mistakes she made at first" and "each task required attention and the day was one task after another."
Other people become connected to Kiki and Reyna through happenstance. At the farm, Kiki meets and becomes friendly with three German tourists, Dieter, Bruno and Steffi, who are illegally collecting Turkish antiques to sell back home in Berlin. The character of each becomes apparent as they all interact and we learn something more of them later in the book when Dieter travels to New York and sees a cuneiform tablet in the gallery of Near Eastern Art at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art which he is sure is the one he sold in Berlin. Meanwhile, Bruno's daughter, Monika, unbeknown to him, has temporary work at the museum doing provenance research.
Another random connection is made as Monika chats to Lynette, who runs a beauty salon, and who was in love with Boyd's close friend Claude, one of the cigarette smugglers. Rayna, too, knows Lynette and feels guilty because she thinks she has caused the accidental death of Claude. And linking all these people, in accidental ways, are the old Turkish carpets which Kiki brought back with her to New York, one of which, she gave to Rayna.
On the last page of the book, Rayna imagines how one of the people we have got to know will react to something she (Rayna) has secretly done. "I was making it up but it gave me great pleasure, and it wasn't all that far from whatever happened."
In many ways this sums up the book. Joan Silber is making it up, but her characters are believable and all their actions are, too, so it is probably not far from whatever can and does happen in real life.
As a novel, Improvement is a fine example of contemporary novel-writing. It is skillfully structured, well-written, and the reader briefly shares fragments of the lives of its characters, whose thoughts, beliefs, actions, worries, guilt, ambitions and humour are wholly human and easily believable.
Improvement was winner of the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
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