This is also the best-case scenario for how Songs Without Words is meant to unfold. Perhaps it would work that way if less attention were paid to, say, the friends' thoughts about no-drain vacuum bags of tuna. In a fraught moment at the supermarket, Liz looks at the tuna packaging and remembers how nifty Sarabeth thinks it is. There is sadness here. The no-drain vacuum is as close as Liz can get to her friend after Lauren's troubles drive a wedge between them.
Liz's initial, also food-related sympathy for Sarabeth (she wishes she could "lift the misery off Sarabeth the way you could lift a mesh dome off a bowl of potato chips, straight up, without jostling the sides of the bowl") is the product of a lifetime. But it has remained unexamined until Liz is also forced to consider her friend's recklessness and Sarabeth's selfish side.
To illustrate these emotions, Packer makes Sarabeth someone who earns her living by poking into others' lives: she spruces up homes for real-estate viewings, working miracles with good-looking fruit and neutral towels. In this aspect of her work, Sarabeth is both an invasive presence and a hanger-on in clients' lives. In her sideline, which is dreaming up "larky" lampshades, she also shows a playful, larky side.
The book uses Liz's pet project, bench painting (loud, awkward plaid crossed with forced-larky flowers), as significant self-expression. And Packer actually communicates more through things that result from the friends' handiwork than those that come out of their mouths. These women dwell in an environment so cosseted that it drives Liz's husband to rhetorical questions ("Did a certain kind of ease pave the way for trouble?"). When trouble strikes their placid paradise, the book eschews cheap melodrama but never otherwise breaks out of its comfy bubble.
"Isn't life funny?" Liz asks laughingly, fairly early in the story. By the end of Songs Without Words, she has returned to a similar attitude, even if it now seems precarious and hard won.
"God, it was the most ordinary things that caused the greatest misery," Liz tells herself at some point on this journey. The honesty of that thought is hard to dispute.
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