Joan Silber on the Process of Discovery, Fiction About Friendship, and the Meaning of Mercy

By Jane Ciabattari

Joan Silber is a contemporary genius at creating artful stories of a multitude of characters who ricochet in cunning ways, crossing generations and continents. I named her 2017 novel Improvement a best book of the year in my BBC Culture column. Improvement, centered around Reyna, a New York single mom with tattoos whose life is influenced by fateful moments, random meetings and accidents, won the National Book Critics Circle fiction award and the PEN/Faulkner award. Secrets of Happiness, her next novel, revolves around a cast of characters whose lives intertwine in ways even they don’t know at the beginning of the book, as secrets and deceptions unfold. Mercy, her new novel, is equally effortless, empathetic, engrossing.

How did she decide to create a timeline that spans decades, from the early 1970s to today, with six narrative points of view and locations from New York City to a Mien village in Northern Thailand to film studios in Los Angeles? I asked. “This is my tenth book, and I have my own history with the form of the novel,” she notes. “The first one covered a whole lifetime—in my ignorance, I thought that was normal—and by the fifth book of fiction I had found this form using different narrators and places and time-frames. It allows me a larger view while keeping the intimacy of the close gaze. And I love moving around, love seeing the links.” Read the full interview at LitHub.