Book Report: Improvement

20. Joan Silber, Improvement (2017) (10/2/19)

Although at 227 pages this book is not long, it is full of life—or rather, many lives. In three parts and eight chapters, we meet various characters whose lives are variously interconnected. Oriental rugs are a theme in the book, and they provide an apt metaphor for the linkages among people across time and place.

There are other themes here too: love, generosity, making peace with ourselves, the fragility of relationship, inner resilience, striving to get ahead, or simply to survive.

The main story (if there can be said to be just one) concerns Jewish Rayna, whom we meet while she is visiting her African American boyfriend, Boyd, in jail on a minor drug offense. When he gets out, he falls in with a scheme to export cigarettes from Virginia to New York, where they can be sold for a nice markup. There is a car accident, however, and one of the smugglers is killed. This kicks into gear several other stories—those of the dead boy's new girlfriend, and of the driver of the truck involved (innocently) in the accident. There is the sister of the dead boy, who happens to be Boyd's old girlfriend. There is also a parallel story involving Rayna's aunt, Kiki, who spent years living in Turkey, which ties in with the stories of some Germans stealing antiquities—who show up again, in an unrelated way.

It's complicated, but . . . not. Because in the end, what you're left with is people's strivings: for love, for joy, for understanding, for peace. Simple stuff, really. It's life. The day-to-day, the mundane, and the flighty beyond-our-ability-to-comprehend.

Here are a couple of passages I flagged, though all of the writing and characterization is stellar.

In all those three months that Boyd was away at Rikers, certain images of him kept me company. The sexy parts. Well, of course. Who wouldn't hold on to those? The way he raised his arm to reach for me in bed, the transformed look on his face when his eyes were closed, a grunt of praise in his throat for something I was doing. So when the actual Boyd returned, real life confused me at first. It was less abstract and it had more speech in it. I had all that longing and then I had this person to talk to.
 What did we talk about? Whether [Rayna's son] Oliver was out of line when he threw his dinosaur at me, whether Rihanna had a better voice than Beyoncé ever did, why people in restaurants could never fucking order logically.

And this one's about the truck driver, Teddy; here he is thinking about a time when, in anger, he ran over a little fancy black dress of his ex-wife's:

After he wrote her the ninth-step letter of apology, someone at a meeting said that he should've replaced the dress, sent a new one. But who wanted an item of clothing from an ex-husband? And a check would have been insulting in another way. Somebody said a gift certificate (a what?). He'd assumed his genuine remorse was enough—it was a lot, from him—but how much of life was weighable and concrete and physical and how much was the-thought-that-counted? He was still figuring that one out.

To finish, here is an interview with Joan Silber where she talks about this lovely book.