From the Bookshelf of Constant Reader…

Improvement

Joan Silber

Start date: September 15, 2018

Finish date: October 1, 2018

Discussion: Reading List

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Reading List

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What Members Thought

Dec 09, 2020 Renata rated it liked it · review of another edition

Between 3 and 4 stars, but I couldn’t quite stretch to 4. I enjoyed the snippets of intersecting lives, but overall is kind of average. Was a good diversion from more serious/challenging reads.

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Sep 15, 2018 Jane rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: recentfiction, linked-stories

I really liked this book. I think it's interesting that the Turkish rugs figure prominently in the stories and the architecture of the book seems to be a weaving of one life into another, sometimes the connection is slight and sometimes it is peripheral, but the echoes of one life in another as we enter another character's story, seem significant. It's a book I felt I needed to be writing about as I read...sometimes had trouble placing a character (like Lynette) towards the end...but Silber's wr I really liked this book. I think it's interesting that the Turkish rugs figure prominently in the stories and the architecture of the book seems to be a weaving of one life into another, sometimes the connection is slight and sometimes it is peripheral, but the echoes of one life in another as we enter another character's story, seem significant. It's a book I felt I needed to be writing about as I read...sometimes had trouble placing a character (like Lynette) towards the end...but Silber's writing made it possible eventually. It may appear racist, but I saw Silber's photo and thought, "This seemingly super-straight white woman gets black culture and black lives." Does she? I wonder if she's widely read by readers of color.

I think white women can write about black culture; and wealthier people can write about lives lived in poverty. I think it's a good practice to write about a race or gender or social class other than your own. I read recently, I think in a book review, that empathy isn't the most important quality...it can feel too much like pity. The most important quality to life a connected, just life (perhaps the reviewer said "moral" life), is imagination. I think Joan Silber has imagination oozing out of her pen and her pores. When I said "I'd like to complicate my reading with other perspectives," I meant my reading of THIS BOOK, and by other perspectives, I mean "black' perspectives, the perspectives who have "lived" poverty, not only read and written about it, or "assumed" poverty for a certain amount of time. Does that make sense? I'd love to see Roxane Gay's take on this book, or Elizabeth Alexander's, or John Wideman's. I think Joan Silber has an imaginative truth about her take on the characters in this book.

This seems to me a "slice of life", real life and not a cinematic or People Magazine sort of life. I think the author has to be asking something about what "improvement" means. And improvement implies change, right? Why did I read it the way I did? I think because my main focus was keeping characters and their connection straight. Is that flaw in the writing or my reading? Kiki and Reyna and Boyd were the ones I felt most commited to...In a book like this, I'm not sure how much were allowed to commit to an individual character. ...more

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Nov 29, 2017 Holly rated it it was ok

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

It has some lovely moments of writing, of insights and confusion and understanding. But it's not All That like Ann Patchett made it out to be.

I mean, I love Kiki. And I get that Reyna is one of those annoyingly slow-to-learn characters, that she is never going to realize the racial and class differences that separate her and Boyd. I wanted to howl in grief and rage at the thought of Claude's Richmond girlfriend and her daughter going on without him, he was so attune ...more

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