The two close female friends in Ann Packer's ladylike, man-proof new novel spend 300-odd pages exploring the nuances of their lifelong bond. If this sounds like an interesting story, bear in mind that any synopsis will make this book appear better than its full, sprawling version turns out to be. Synopses emphasize plots, themes and dramatic tensions. They do not dawdle through descriptions of how cheese rolls can be "such a reliable pleasure," how raisin-bran cookies have a "branny, raisiny" nature or how the essence of soccer is "the blunt, running, back and forth of the game."
But Songs Without Words has time for a lot of bland, homey flourishes. And it relies upon them heavily to express how life is like a seesaw, that thing in playgrounds upon which children ride up or down. After the keenly observed realism she demonstrated in her much more penetrating Dive From Clausen's Pier, Packer this time treats pedestrian, domestic details about her characters strategically, as if they captured physical manifestations of interior currents. Strategically, this succeeds only in giving Songs Without Words a pedestrian spirit.
Meet Liz and Sarabeth, two women who live in the Bay Area and are as different as their names. Liz is down to earth and practical, while Sarabeth is creative and quirky. Sarabeth is also single and uneasy about her life in Berkeley, whereas Liz is firmly settled in suburban bliss. Liz and her husband, Brody, have the kind of marriage in which "maybe I'll just skip my pajamas tonight" might be a hot-blooded remark from either of them.
Liz and Brody also have two children, Lauren and Joe. Lauren is bursting with dangerous angst in ways that make her seem to have wandered in from an explosively timely Jodi Picoult novel, then stopped ticking. Lauren is showing signs of distress, including an embarrassing high school crush and anxiety about her grades. She goes to the kind of school where girls say things like: "Want some dry-roasted edamame? They're rich in isoflavones." Something is making Lauren feel inadequate in this environment.
But Liz is awfully busy. She thinks about crafts and yoga and Sarabeth and what's for dinner, not really noticing her daughter's situation. Sooner or later this kind of setup might lead the book into dark waters if it were actually going anywhere. But the main effect of Lauren's malaise is to provoke frissons of discord between Sarabeth and Liz.
In a novel that wishfully invokes Mrs. Dalloway, Anna Karenina, the paintings of Alex Katz and other touchstones of subtle bourgeois dissatisfaction, resentments between the two friends begin to emerge. As the prologue to Songs Without Words explains, Sarabeth grew up in Liz's family after her own mother's suicide. And the idea of motherhood taps into her deepest longings. She depends on Liz not only for sisterly intimacy but also for a kind of support that is not in the normal range of adult friendship.
Or is it? Packer's most intuitive point here is that mother-daughter dynamics and neediness linger throughout life, even among apparent peers, in ways that become sharper over time. At her most genuinely astute, Liz thinks about "how knowledge accumulated in layers rather than linearly, how you learned the same things over and over, but differently each time, more deeply."
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.
There is no politician today more colorful than Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯). The recall vote against her on July 26 will test the limits of her unique style, making it one of the most fascinating to watch. Taiwan has a long history of larger-than-life, controversial and theatrical politicians. As far back as 1988, lawmaker Chu Kao-cheng (朱高正) was the first to brawl and — legend has it — was the first to use the most foul Taiwanese Hokkien curse on the floor of the legislature. Current Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker Wang Shih-chien (王世堅) has become famous
July 14 to July 20 When Lin Tzu-tzeng (林資曾) arrived in Sansia (三峽) in 1830, he found the local conditions ideal for indigo dyeing. Settlers had already planted indigo across the nearby hills, the area’s water was clean and low in minerals and the river offered direct transport to the bustling port of Bangka (艋舺, modern-day Wanhua District in Taipei). Lin hailed from Anxi (安溪) in Fujian Province, which was known for its dyeing traditions. He was well-versed in the craft, and became wealthy after opening the first dyeing workshop in town. Today, the sign for the Lin Mao Hsing (林茂興) Dye
Xu Pengcheng looks over his shoulder and, after confirming the coast is clear, helps his crew of urban adventurers climb through the broken window of an abandoned building. Long popular in the West, urban exploration, or “urbex” for short, sees city-dwelling thrill-seekers explore dilapidated, closed-off buildings and areas — often skirting the law in the process. And it is growing in popularity in China, where a years-long property sector crisis has left many cities dotted with empty buildings. Xu, a 29-year-old tech worker from the eastern city of Qingdao, has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers for his photos of rundown schools and
At times, it almost seems that former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is out to sabotage the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). As if on cue, with the recall campaigns against KMT lawmakers in full swing, Ma thought it would be a good time to lead a delegation of students to China and attend the 17th Straits Forum (海峽論壇) and meet with Wang Huning (王滬寧), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo member entrusted by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to be his second in command on Taiwan policy and to run the United Front Work Department (UFWD) in charge of subverting enemies,
RSS