When a man discovers his father in New York has long had another, secret, family—a wife and two kids—the interlocking fates of both families lead to surprise loyalties, love triangles, and a reservoir of inner strength.
Secrets of Happiness looks like a series of linked stories, but it’s more like a roulette wheel in print: Each chapter spins to some other character in a large circle of possibilities. It takes only a moment to get your bearings, and the disappointment of leaving one narrator behind is instantly replaced by the delight of meeting a new one ... These stories unfurl with such verbal verisimilitude that they’re like late-night phone calls from old friends. Every imperative page trips along with the wry wisdom of ordinary speech — the illusion of artlessness that only the most artful writers can create ... One senses throughout this novel that Silber knows something crucial about the secrets of happiness.
Her most interesting characters are alert to the main chance, nursing various degrees of larceny in their hearts; while the more sympathetic—if less interesting—ones have grasped the paltriness of a life dedicated to getting and spending. In the seven artfully linked stories of Ms. Silber’s new novel...we find both types, but once again those who display the will to be canny, which money in the offing or in the pocket seems to confer, are the most deeply penetrated and superbly conjured ... Each of the seven sections engages our interest right off the bat; each has a first sentence pregnant with promise ... Having seized our attention, Ms. Silber pushes forward into her characters’ stories, summing up in fleet, fluid prose the circumstances and acts that have shaped their lives to this point, then slipping deftly into further events where, for better or worse, the gravitational force of money can be felt ... Despite their unity of theme, Ms. Silber’s stories are the furthest thing from didactic ... they are rich with the complexities of life; the characters’ motives and their decisions arise out of personalities meeting circumstance. Further, the stories create a world made fully dimensional through changes of perspective—major characters appear and reappear as part of one or another’s experience and testimony ... It is a fine thing, subtly done, and truly exhilarating.
Silber’s knack for inhabiting far-flung realities is remarkable. She doesn’t use spelling tricks to evoke dialects or regional accents as her narrators reveal what it’s like to grow up half-Thai in Queens, do garment union work in Phnom Penh, or work on a textile industry documentary in London. Instead, her handling of her characters’ diverse manners of speech is self-effacingly spare ... The book’s narrative suspense increases with the arrival of each new narrator (there are six altogether) ... Silber’s prose is so efficiently distilled that it occasionally feels overly abrupt. Still, the swift way she moves through tricky states of mind can be exquisite ... Secrets of Happiness pays the best kind of attention to its characters’ desires, dilemmas and, of course, connections.
