Secrets of Happiness

December 14, 2020
A crushing indiscretion comes to light in the sharp latest from National Book Critics Circle Award winner Silber (Improvement). The story is initially narrated by Ethan, a gay Manhattan attorney who discovers his businessman father, Gil, has led a secret double life after Gil is hit with a paternity suit by a Thai woman named Nok. Gil suffers several strokes and decides to recover with his Thai family, and awkward visitations ensue at Nok’s apartment, where Gil calls Nok Abby, Ethan’s mother’s name. The situation’s emotional complexity unfolds and expands through accounts from a diverse range of interconnected narrators, juggled by Silber with uncanny dexterity. In addition to witty and genially confident Ethan, there’s Abby, who now teaches English in Thailand; Ethan’s half brother, Joe, who feels uneasy about the return from Bangkok of his younger brother Jack, whom Joe had recently freed from jail by bribing the police; various characters’ ex-lovers and their exes; a Nepalese film director; and others. These perspectives become an extended family of sorts conjoined by love yet tormented by the past. As more layers peel away across continents, the fallout of Gil’s affair trickles down through Silber’s intricate and emotionally elaborate study of emotional ties. This mesmerizing story of love, lies, and the consequences of betrayal brims with heart and intelligence.

April 15, 2021
Ethan first meets his father's other family after his father, Gil, suffers a stroke. Of course, he had met them before without realizing it, when Gil took the family to the Thai restaurant where his other wife was the hostess who always gave them a good table. Gil brought Nok from Thailand to Queens, eventually having two sons with her. Ethan, a gay lawyer, witnesses how his father's secret shatters his family's sense of security. The ramifications from the revelation spread out to five different characters who share their stories. Some narrators are close to the center of Gil's tale, like his half-Thai son Joe, who travels to Bangkok to bail his brother out of jail; some are farther afield from Gil, like the filmmaker whose mother calls Gil, an old flame, asking for a loan. What the six intertwining stories lack in distinctive voices they make up for in frankness and complexity, as each character reckons with the insidious influence of money on his or her lives and struggles to find success, fulfillment, and love.

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Starred review from January 15, 2021
A new novel in stories from the master of the form. Silber has her own sly and satisfying system for linked stories, plucking a character from one to helm the next, moving the narrative forward, or sideways, from that person's point of view. Her latest uses this form to explore all the ways money doesn't buy happiness and some of the things that actually do. The seven stories begin with and return to a character named Ethan, whose father--who travels a lot for his work in the garment industry--has a secret: a second family in Queens. So begins a journey based in New York, landing lightly in Chiang Mai ("so fun-loving it celebrated three different new year's"), Bangkok, Dhaka, Kathmandu, and Phnom Penh before returning to Manhattan. Along the way, the word money is used 107 times, yet Silber's storytelling is so artful, so filled with humor and aper�us and diverting asides, that its moral lessons emerge quite gently. Each character adds something to the store of "secrets." Ethan and his sister, for example, are interpreting letters from their mother, who's spending a year in Thailand and sounds pretty happy for a woman betrayed. Is she in love? No, it's not the "smug triumph" of the newly coupled: "She was happy from other things--the fabric she found at the night market, the celebration at the temple on the mountain, and the trek in the forest she and her friends did one weekend, where they saw caves and waterfalls." Bud is a taxi driver who both suffers and commits a robbery, then refuses an inheritance: "Of course, I felt rich for turning it down. You could list all the things you didn't need and feel wonderful for abandoning them." Later, he comments, "Sanity is much sexier than people tend to think." That last line echoes the great Grace Paley, to whom Silber is so close in spirit and voice. While Paley was an all-New York gal, Silber makes faraway places seem familiar--oh, for the time when we can work on knowing the world even one-tenth as well as she does. These secrets of happiness really will make you happy, at least for a few sweet hours.

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March 1, 2021

Young New York lawyer Ethan's life was upended when he learned that his father has always had a secret second family. His mother's response has been to spend a year working abroad, while Ethan gets involved with his half-brothers even as he's caught up in a love triangle of his own. Following the National Book Critics Circle Award Improvement.

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