Stories of Sexual and Religious Longings: Joan Silber's "Ideas of Heaven"

Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories by Joan Silber is now, according to Amazon rankings, the least-selling of the 2004 "no name" nominees for the National Book Award. Although I do not think it better than the winner, Lily Tuck's The News from Paraguay, I think that it is much better than the other nominated book I've read, Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum .

The ring of long stories is not strung on anything like a coin in nine hands (Yourcenar) or syphilis transmission (Schnitzler's "La Ronde." With one of the leaps from the 20^th to the 16^th century (and another back to the early 20^th century), the linking is an impressive feat. Three of the other links are more substantial... but the book depends not on continuity, but on the quality of the stories.

Three of the six are narrated by males, one gay, two straight (one American, one French). There were no notes that sounded false, though I am on the lookout for them. "The High Road" narrated by a gay dancer who became a teacher was honored by a 2003 O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize.

The recurrent tone of all six is melancholic, though I would not say that they all have sad endings. Some bad things happen to characters (not usually the narrators) of many. There are some losses the narrators find hard to understand-not just losses of love but of loved ones.

The title story is the longest and the one I like least-perhaps in part because I got a heavy dose of American missionaries in early-20^th-century (Boxer Rebellion) China from recently reading Anchee Min's Pearl of China. I believe that Silber creates a believable narrator in a New Englander wife of a missionary. I'm not sure what I am supposed to take away from the mutual misunderstanding of American missionaries and Chinese, however.

I think my favorite is "Ashes of Love," despite the recurrent quotations from Rilke, a volume of his poetry the male narrator carried with him in world travels. The way he comes to terms with a belligerent teenage son moved me. So did the ending of "My Shape," the opening story in the volume, which concerns trying to become a dancer, then taking up Tibetan Buddhism. Two of the male characters in "My Shape" are narrators of later stories.

Venetian love poetess Gaspara Stampa (1523-1554) is the narrator of a story of making music (lute) and poetry and love (to men whose social station was too high above hers for marriage to be a possibility). She expresses regrets but does not complain. None of Silber's narrators whine or wallow in self-pity, though they have some substantial things to whine about. Many take more than a casual interest in Buddhism (not the Protestant missionaries who pack Chinese beliefs into the category "superstitions," though the narrator takes some notice of Chinese ideas of heaven).

Silber said, "I certainly didn't want to write historical fiction where everything was cozy and adorable." No more than the other two 2004 NBA nominees whose books I have read (both set in the 19^th century, in France, England, and Paraguay) did she. (The geographical and historical reach in all three of these books makes the dismissal of the nominees as all being "women living in New York" seem disingenuous).

The combination of unsentimental clarity and compassion is very much in the tradition of Chekhov, who Silber 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 six of those in Ideas of Heaven are.

BTW, Silber's NBA nomination did not come out of nowhere. Her first novel, Household Words won the PEN/Hemingway Prize in 2001.