BookLife Review by Carol O'Day: Improvement (Joan Silber, author)

six degrees of separation, contemporary fiction, aunt-niece, adventuroousness, Turkey, Germany, single mother, multiple points of view, minor character narration, New York, Rikers Island

Improvement, by Joan Silber, is a quirky, multi-point of view, compelling book. It is the winner of both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. It was also one of the New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books for 2018. It escaped me then, but I am pleased that I discovered it now. Improvement is peopled with broken and imperfect, and therefore relatable and realistic, characters. It cleverly weaves its tale through a series of cascading chapters that select a minor character from a prior chapter, flush out that character’s B, C or D line story and still advance the story’s through lines. 

The two primary characters in the novel–the two that recur and are awarded multiple focal chapters in the book–are Kiki and her niece, Reyna. Both are free spirits of a sort and both are divorced from traditional trajectories of ambition and achievement. Improvement opens by introducing the adventurous Kiki, a classics major who heads off solo in her mid-twenties on a global travel adventure. She lands in Istanbul, meets a carpet merchant, marries and stays for about a decade. She returns to New York, and flows relatively happily through her life without monster goals or ambitions, content to work subsistence jobs and read classics. We then meet her niece, Reyna, who is living life as a single mother in Harlem, working as a receptionist in a veterinary clinic and visiting her sometimes boyfriend, Boyd, on Rikers Island where he is serving time for selling weed. Reyna is in touch with Kiki ,but eschews most of her aunt’s advice and encouragement to travel the world, which Reyna reads as “code” suggesting she dump Boyd. 

We travel back and forth in time, discovering Kiki’s past life in Turkey, Reyna’s rollercoaster life with and without Boyd and his criminal schemes. The pivotal crisis of the book is Reyna’s indirect role in the tragic death of Boyd’s partner in crime. Claude. She declines to go on the road trip in which Claude dies in a car accident, and ever after wonders if her presence might have altered the outcome. Along the way, we meet other characters who add dimension to the aunt-niece story–the German smugglers Kiki met in Cappadocia, Turkey, Claude’s short-term girlfriend who is unaware that he died on one of his trips across state lines and mourns his silence, the trucker with whom Claude’s vehicle collides, Claude’s sister, Lynette, a lash technician, and her client, Monika, who, as fate would have it, is the daughter of one of the German smugglers whom Kiki had encountered decades earlier. The infamous six degrees of separation close the story circle here. 

There is serendipity and an offbeat joy in reading this novel. As it unfolds, the reader pieces together the threads that connect the characters. We marvel at the oblique interconnectedness of the characters, though the characters themselves remain largely unaware and unconnected to each other. There is a resonant reality to the concept that the people with whom we have only glancing contact in our lives, have radiating story spokes of their own. It is both fantastical and inevitable that occasionally, somewhere down this web of story spokes, one story will intersect with another, almost unbeknownst to those experiencing the original contact. Kiki never meets or knows the lash technician, Lynette; these two are only “connected” because Lynette is the ex-girlfriend of Boyd (Kiki’s niece’s boyfriend), and Lynette is the sister of Boyd’s friend, Claude, who died in the accident to which Reyna feels oddly connected because of her decision not to go on the trip on which he died. Kiki is also connected, though neither knows it, to Lynette’s client Monika, because Kiki once met Monika’s German mother, Steffi, in Turkey. Yet, one day, Reyna sells a rug Kiki gave her and sends the proceeds to Lynette in a gesture of atonement for what she perceives as her very minor role in Claude’s death. Reyna’s gift to Lynette provides the money Lynette needs to leave New York and open a lash salon in Philadelphia, in turn creating a small ripple of change in Monika’s life.  

Improvement captures that oddly familiar phenomenon;  our lives are filled with dozens of oblique, glancing and serendipitous connections just like this—the neighbor across the street from your new house is the woman your brother dated in college, and dumped. Your son’s college professor across the country is the husband of your daughter’s beloved former third grade teacher. These connections don’t change our lives, but they are threads in the tapestry of our interconnectedness.

Improvement contains two express references to its title, both buried in the stories of very minor characters. Claude’s out-of-state love, Darisse, puzzles over the sudden cessation of contact from him (,unbeknownst to her, he died in a car accident on his way to see her).  Darisse muses that she,

“...is becoming more religious, but in private; she had her own rituals. She sat on her bed with her eyes closed; she thought of the walls of the room turning into air. Air from a larger space. The point was to ask for strength. Improvement wasn’t coming any other way. She was doing this almost every night and there was an aftereffect that pleased her.”

Similarly, the truck driver, Teddy, with whom Claude fatally collided, begins an affair with his ex-wife, Sally, when he is on his trucking road trips and passing through her area.  As a part of Teddy’s AA program, Teddy owes Sally an amends, and he sends her an amends email, to which she response saying, “...she hoped his new life was a shitload better than his last, there was a lot of room for improvement, and the next time he heard from her was twenty-six years later.” Though Teddy’s life did indeed improve after his marriage to Sally ended, through AA and his new marriage, his decision to engage in this affair raises questions about how much.  To the extent that these two passages explain the book’s title, it may be to suggest that the concept of self-improvement may be overrated, a matter of chance and circumstance, and fleeting at best. 

Enjoy Silber’s tightly crafted romp through happenstance and serendipitous connections in the multi-award winning novel. Silber’s ability to create dimensional characters in the space of a single chapter allows the threads of these oblique connections to pulsate and resonate long after the final page. 

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