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Songs without Words (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Ann Packer

ISBN13: 9780375727177
ISBN10: 0375727175
Condition: Standard
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Staff Pick

Every once in a while a book comes along that is so astonishing you can't find words to articulate how you feel about it — instead you give away your copy and say, "Just read it." In this unnerving and utterly moving novel about the depth of women's friendships, Ann Packer delivers each poetic passage with a quiet force that reveals how meaningful the seemingly mundane facts of modern life really are.
Recommended by Danielle, Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Liz and Sarabeth were girlhood neighbors in the suburbs of Northern California, brought as close as sisters by the suicide of Sarabeth's mother. In the decades that followed, their relationship remained a source of continuity and strength. But when Liz's adolescent daughter enters dangerous waters, the women's friendship takes a devastating turn, forcing Liz and Sarabeth to question their most deeply held beliefs about their connection.

From the bestselling author of The Dive from Clausen's Pier, Songs without Words is the gripping story of a lifelong friendship pushed to the breaking point.

Review:

"Packer follows her well-received first novel, The Dive from Clausen's Pier, with a richly nuanced meditation on the place of friendship in women's lives. Liz and Sarabeth's childhood friendship deepened following Sarabeth's mother's suicide when the girls were 16; now the two women are in their 40s and living in the Bay Area. Responsible mother-of-two Liz has come to see eccentric, bohemian Sarabeth, with her tendency to enter into inappropriate relationships with men, as more like another child than as a sister or mutually supportive friend. When Liz's teenage daughter, Lauren, perpetuates a crisis, Liz doubts her parenting abilities; Sarabeth is plunged into uncomfortable memories; and the hidden fragilities of what seemed a steadfast relationship come to the fore. Packer adroitly navigates Lauren's teen despair, Sarabeth's lonely longings and Liz's feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Although Liz's husband, Brody, and other men in the book are less than compelling, Packer gets deep into the perspectives of Liz, Sarabeth and Lauren, and follows out their conflicts with an unsentimental sympathy. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"Ann Packer has been looking in our windows.

The majority of readers of contemporary literary fiction in America — especially fiction written by women — are women themselves, and in her new novel, 'Songs Without Words,' Packer has tapped into the things that worry many of these readers: love and satisfaction in their relationships, the emotional and psychological health of their... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) offspring, the terrible possibility of spiritual and familial dissolution.

'Songs Without Words' describes a childhood friendship tested by the challenges of adult lives that bear the friends along separate paths. Packer solidifies the reputation she established in the enormously successful 'The Dive from Clausen's Pier' as an uncannily observant chronicler of contemporary American domestic life. 'Songs Without Words' touches every nerve exposed by the solidly middle-class dilemmas of today's parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers. There are no wars or plagues here, no suicide bombers or political turmoil. Instead, there is the fraught landscape of suburban life with its troubling questions about marriage, parenthood, friendship and fulfillment.

Packer is no ironist; she is not Claire Messud or Zadie Smith, whose most recent novels unspool under the cool panoramic gaze of a social critic. The characters in Packer's novels are not so much exposed as they are understood — understood and seen, in all the psychological sense of that word. Packer is devoted to her characters, and it is her pleasure as a novelist — and ours as her readers — to watch these people move through the intensely familiar and intimate hours of their days and nights, spooning coffee into the Krups, taking a bath, crawling into bed. Packer follows them from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom (and to the car and the grocery store and Starbucks and the mall), and her pursuit is so unnervingly attentive that it becomes revelatory. Middle-of-the-night readers — and there will be lots of them — who cannot put down 'Songs Without Words' will surely look up at the darkest hour with the sense that they are being watched.

The first paragraph of the novel is one of those lovely moments in fiction when a writer conjures in just a few sentences, with just a few images, the entire universe of the story that is about to unfold. The scene feels both like a presage of things to come and, in its quiet, painterly composition, like a metaphor — of what, at first, we are not exactly sure, of course, but the world Packer evokes here is the familiar beauty-crossed-with-loneliness of the suburban evening. (Countless writers have been drawn to this moment, most famously perhaps James Agee in the opening scene of his novel 'A Death in the Family'). Here is Packer's beginning:

'Each evening, the streetlights came on at dusk, and the view out the window changed, from barely glowing kitchens and TV rooms to the houses that contained them, and to the trees that sheltered the houses. It seemed to Sarabeth that for a little while there was a kind of balance out there, an equilibrium. But then, quickly, darkness came down from the sky, and soon the lit rooms returned to prominence, and finally everything else was black, and the world seemed limited to a few bright windows on a street in Palo Alto.'

Sarabeth and Liz grew up across the street from each other, their girlhood friendship deepened by the tragedy of Sarabeth's mother's suicide when the girls were in high school. Packer offers their history in a brief prologue, and the first chapter of the novel finds Liz married with two teenaged children and contentedly immersed in her roles as wife and mother. Sarabeth, on the other hand, is still single, uncertain about her life and pursuing a career as a house stager, someone who creates the ambiance of cozy domesticity in homes people are trying to sell, a job that seems like a painful destiny for someone whose own childhood was interrupted by domestic tragedy.

Of the two, Liz appears to have it all, but when her 15-year-old daughter, Lauren — the novel's most heartbreaking portrait — falls into the grip of adolescent depression, Liz's world falls apart. And so does Sarabeth's; Lauren's unhappiness brings Sarabeth dangerously near to the memory of her own mother, and her retreat from Liz is both cowardly and — this is Packer's generosity at work — completely understandable. The only thing that can drive old friends apart more surely than death is unhappiness, and it seems that Liz and Sarabeth's estrangement will separate them permanently. 'They all seemed irrevocably distant, the people she knew,' Sarabeth thinks, 'as far away as Earth was from the moon.'

There are some novels that show us the 'other,' and in doing so expand our ideas about humanity. 'Songs Without Words' is a novel that shows us — tenderly, and with a full awareness of the precious dignity and indignity of human experience — ourselves.

Carrie Brown's most recent novel is 'The Rope Walk.'

" Reviewed by Carrie Brown, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

Review:

"Engrossing, forgiving and quietly wise, Songs never makes a false step as Packer keeps both the pages and her readers' minds turning until the very end." People Magazine

Review:

"A quiet narrative whose emotions, we come to realize, run deep and true....Commendably ambitious and ultimately rewarding." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"As in The Dive From Clausen's Pier, Packer makes the ripples from one act so involving, you can't pull away." Good Housekeeping

Review:

"What's most impressive...is Packer's ability to set a story in the wealthy and beautiful suburbs of San Francisco and make her characters' suffering authentic." USA Today

Review:

"A novel has the potential not simply to hold up a mirror to our known experience but also to reflect the seemingly indecipherable tangle of our inner worlds." Los Angeles Times

Review:

"[A] close and careful look at the bonds of friendship, and the painful aftermath when a loved one follows the sad compulsion to end her own life." Cleveland Plain Dealer

Review:

"[R]eaders will be pleased to find Packer's remarkable talent for characterization in the pages of her second novel." Charlotte Observer

Synopsis:

From the author of the bestselling The Dive from Clausen's Pier comes her long-awaited second novel in which she takes readers on a journey into a lifelong friendship pushed to the breaking point.

About the Author

Ann Packer received the Great Lakes Book Award for The Dive from Clausen's Pier, which was a national bestseller. She is also the author of Mendocino and Other Stories. She is a past recipient of a James Michener award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and other magazines, as well as in Prize Stories 1992: The O. Henry Awards. She lives in northern California with her family.

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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:

: katatrina, May 19, 2009 (view all comments by katatrina)
Ann Packer is able to create characters that resonate with her readers, no matter what. The characters in this book were interesting and well-developed, and I enjoyed the back-and-forth of viewpoints and angles for the story. I think it was a well-crafted book, and I had been yearning for a book I couldn't put down. This was it.
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: Kate Deeks, October 22, 2008 (view all comments by Kate Deeks)
WORDSTOCK AUTHOR APPEARANCE:

Packer will be appearing at Wordstock on Saturday, November 8, at 2:00 p.m. on the Powell's Stage to read from the book and take questions from readers.

www.wordstockfestival.com
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Product Details

ISBN:: 9780375727177
Author:: Packer, Ann
Publisher:: Vintage Books USA
Subject:: Literary
Subject:: Bildungsromans
Subject:: Self-perception
Edition Description:: Paperback
Series:: Vintage Contemporaries
Publication Date:: August 2008
Binding:: Paperback
Language:: English
Pages:: 369
Dimensions:: 7.94x5.20x.82 in. .61 lbs.

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