Remarkable Unity Amidst Diversity: Joan Silber's "The Size of the World" (2008)

Joan Silber's Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories was nominated for the 2004 National Book Award. Some of the links between long stories (novellas), particularly back and forth to the 16^th century were slight, though three had major connections. I least liked the title novella (set among American missionaries during the Boxer Rebellion in China), but was impressed that the narrators were evenly split: three males, three females. I tend to skeptical of male narrators in books written by women. (I don't have the basis for skepticism of female narrators in books written by men...) Silber's male narrators seems credible to me in Ideas of Heaven and in her similar mix of narrators in what is billed a "novel," her 2008 The Size of the World, though one of those in the latter, Mike, narrator of "Allegiance" seems to me just a bit too focused on relationships. Each of the chapters is a life history of the narrator. The furthest reach back in time is to Sicily before WWII. The geographical span is primarily between southern (Muslim) Thailand and metropolitan New York, with stops in Florida and Mexico. A fascination with Buddhism that ran through Ideas of Heaven is here supplemented by an interest in Muslims (not so much with Islam).

Silber's combination of unsentimental clarity and compassion is very much in the tradition of Chekhov, who she has said was an early influence. She was a student of Grace Paley and credits Alice Munro's stories for showing her that stories could contain vast amounts of time and move around freely between decades. Her work gave me a sense of the capaciousness and freedom of the story form and made me want to write what I call 'biographical' stories," which all twelve of those in Ideas of Heaven and The Size of the World are. In a more recent interview, she added: "I have two somewhat contradictory impulses at this point in my life. I'm a miniaturist by nature - I love the small moment seen intensely. And I love the sweep of time passing." She has found ways to have her cake and eat it, too (History and individual subjectivities and entanglements).

The female concerns are primarily with relationships - familial, marital, and an unacted-upon extramarital attraction. The male concerns are tin-mining, the manufacture and sale of screws, and their malfunctioning in US warplanes during the war on Vietnam. The multiple cultural shocks of Kit in "Paradise" (Thailand) and Annunziata (as Sicily is invaded by American troops and she is swept off to New Jersey, to which Kit eventually returns with a half-Thai son) make for the life stories that most interest me. The males are less able to bend, more liable to break, though the women feel losses keenly. All of them run up against ethnocentrism-their own (including rural Sicilian in one instance), those in other societies, and, arguably, the corporate culture that Owen cannot accept). The size of the world is very large, the scope of individual's understanding tends to be quite limited: ""Each separate corner of the world was obsessed with its own set of the familiar, the mass of fine points its residents were sure every human had to know," which makes for a planet "populated by idiots savants, who knew what they knew very well and not all that much else."

I must admit that I began with the Sicilian chapter, not certain whether I would read the whole book. It is the penultimate one and the final one, after which I read the first four, intrigued me. Had I read them in order, I suspect I would have gone back to reread the first one when I reached the end (as was the case in reading Ideas of Heaven). The first chapter does not open as strongly as some others- including my starting point, the fifth one, so I'm inclined to say that one may begin with any of the chapters-the beginning of any chapter, not anywhere at all in the book! In any order, the way in which individual specifics of the life story connect to the other ones is impressive, though I think each can stand alone as the story of one life embedded in multiple sociocultural milieux.

The flow across chapters/narrators is not chronological, and if I cared about defending the borders of the category "novel," I would say that The Size of the World is also a "ring of stories," albeit with more connections among them than among those in Ideas of Heaven. But I think "novel" is a loose category into which many diverse writings have been lumped, and recommend Silber's fiction whatever the apposite genre is. She writes interesting characters in a vast range of interesting situations scattered across space and time. I think that The Size of the World is even better than Ideas of Heavenwas, and that was very good indeed!