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Overview
Joan Silber's In My Other Life is grounded in New York, and each of these stories focuses on "the Great Divide" the surprising reversal that separates an old life from the new. From the glories of bad habits in their twenties ("you never knew what you would end up doing"), Silber's people move though decades of sobering conclusions and elating accidents.The heroes of these stories are bartenders, painters, ex-drug dealers, birth control counselors, video store managers (people who have been around the proverbial block). The decisive turn can be the breezy agreement to a green-card marriage that lasts for twenty years, or a young mother's phone call home that sends her toddler away.
In "Lake Natasink" (first published in The New Yorker), an ex-junkie keeps taunting a friend who is about to step off the edge into a new family life in the country. In "Ragazzi," two former rock groupies, with families and jobs, try to remember "how they learned not to be idiots." In "What Lasts," newlyweds go from a lifestyle funded by dope smuggling in Turkey to a more mundane income gleaned from retailing women's underwear. As they nest in a "loft as big as a lake," the couple's happiness is threatened when a rare illness strikes. Once "too young, too vain, too something to think about the consequences," these veteran characters are witnesses to the ways "your heart gets heavier."
Silber's prose has all the traits of an urban sensibility: confidence, wit, individual style, and an emotional distance that keeps the despair of city life in perspective. Her characters often face risks that astonish themselves (a lesbian couple adopts a biracial baby, an ex-stripper thinks about a life without sex). These characters are what Hopkins called "widows of an insight lost" they know that each era has its own assumptions and they're never enough; real life is always trickier and vaster. Narrated with abiding calm, Silber's people encounter the surprise of the particular, "ready or not."
Synopsis
A hip New Yorker confronts the accident of middle age.
New York Times Book Review
Silber, the author of two previous novels, treats dysfunction a bit more gently than Lorrie Moore, with whom she shares a marvelous, perspicacious wit. Her characters struggle to keep going, however slowly, without losing their dignity. . . These elegant and wise stories pay tribute to ordinary urban heroes people who have lived long enough to know that when misfortune shows up, there's no need to make a fuss.
She offers an archaeology of feeling layered with pure, vivid insight.
Editorials
New York Times Book Review
Silber, the author of two previous novels, treats dysfunction a bit more gently than Lorrie Moore, with whom she shares a marvelous, perspicacious wit. Her characters struggle to keep going, however slowly, without losing their dignity. . . These elegant and wise stories pay tribute to ordinary urban heroes people who have lived long enough to know that when misfortune shows up, there's no need to make a fuss.She offers an archaeology of feeling layered with pure, vivid insight.
Publishers Weekly -
Troubled, middle-aged New Yorkers ponder their wild youthful selves and their belated or botched second chances in these 12 accessible, moving tales. Novelist Silber (Household Words; In the City) imagines households of mostly decent, though emotionally scarred, women and men trying to cope with kids, difficult exes or grown siblings. Some of these reflective characters can hardly believe they've outlived their perilous youth. The loquacious narrator in "Bobby Jackson" reminisces about his days as a downtown bartender and smack addict ("I was swimming around in fulfilled wishes"). He's survived to become a divorced realtor with a daughter, but fears his pals from the old days have fared far worse. In "Lake Natasink" (first published in the New Yorker), Patty and her lover, Charlotte, prepare to move with their adopted baby from New York City to a farmhouse upstate; "Ordinary" follows these same three characters to their not-quite-paradisial country life. Here and in the poignant "Commendable," Silber authentically depicts the affections and troubles of unconventional couples, making accurate, sensitive prose look easy. She can also sharply portray dysfunctional couples, or uneasy relationships among exes. Devotees of Alice Munro will find in Silber a simpler take on some of Munro's favorite themes: the revised expectations of middle age; the fading and nuanced traumas of adolescence; the lingering hangover from the hippie era. "What Lasts," a tale of volatile newlyweds, contains some of the book's most striking, skeptical writing, exemplary of the keen, expressive sense of the improbable, of dumb luck and ill luck, and of unlikely recovery that makes Silber's stories so warmly convincing.Library Journal
Silber's appropriately titled new collection features characters who lived recklessly in their young adulthood but have reached a middle age fraught with mundane problems and the typical issues raised by spouses and children. "Lake Natasink" and "Ordinary" portray the experiences of a lesbian couple before and after they move from New York City to a small town upstate. New York figures prominently in many stories as a place either to escape from or return to. Many of the characters' younger selves worked in bars and restaurants, supplementing their income with drug dealing. "Bobby Jackson" captures the nostalgia for "hanging out" with friends after work and staying up all night. In "First Marriage" a woman is surprised to find that her green card marriage is permanent. A nicely executed collection; recommended.Ruminator Review
She offers an archaeology of feeling layered with pure, vivid insight.Carmela Ciuraru
Silber, the author of two previous novels, treats dysfunction a bit more gently than Lorrie Moore, with whom she shares a marvelous, perspicacious wit. Her characters struggle to keep going, however slowly, without losing their dignity. . . These elegant and wise stories pay tribute to ordinary urban heroes -- people who have lived long enough to know that when misfortune shows up, there's no need to make a fuss.—The New York Times Book Review