Songs without Words
Ann Packer, 2007
Knopf Doubleday
322 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375727177
Summary
Ann Packer’s debut novel, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, was a nationwide best seller that established her as one of our most gifted chroniclers of the interior lives of women.
Now, in her long-awaited second novel, she takes us on a journey into a lifelong friendship pushed to the breaking point. Expertly, with the keen introspection and psychological nuance that are her hallmarks, she explores what happens when there are inequities between friends and when the hard-won balances of a long relationship are disturbed, perhaps irreparably, by a harrowing crisis.
Liz and Sarabeth were childhood neighbors in the suburbs of northern California, brought as close as sisters by the suicide of Sarabeth’s mother when the girls were just sixteen. In the decades that followed—through Liz’s marriage and the birth of her children, through Sarabeth’s attempts to make a happy life for herself despite the shadow cast by her mother’s act—their relationship remained a source of continuity and strength.
But when Liz’s adolescent daughter enters dangerous waters that threaten to engulf the family, the fault lines in the women’s friendship are revealed, and both Liz and Sarabeth are forced to reexamine their most deeply held beliefs about their connection.
Songs Without Words is about the sometimes confining roles we take on in our closest relationships, about the familial myths that shape us both as children and as parents, and about the limits—and the power—of the friendships we create when we are young.
Once again, Ann Packer has written a novel of singular force and complexity: thoughtful, moving,and absolutely gripping, it more than confirms her prodigious literary gifts. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—Stanford, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., University of Iowa
• Awards—James Michener Award, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
• Currently—lives in Northern California
Ann Packer is an American novelist and short story writer, perhaps best known for her critically acclaimed first novel The Dive From Clausen's Pier. She is the recipient of a James Michener Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
Personal life
Packer was born in Stanford, California. She is the daughter of Stanford University professors Herbert Packer and Nancy (Huddleston) Packer.
Her mother was a student of novelist Wallace Stegner at the Stanford Writing Program; she later joined the Stanford faculty as professor of English and creative writing. Ann's father was on the faculty of Stanford Law School, where he highlighted the tensions between Due Process and Crime Control. In 1969, when Ann was 10 years old, he suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body. He committed suicide three years later. Her brother, George Packer, is a novelist, journalist, and playwright.
Packer currently lives in Northern California with her two children.
Early career
Packer was an English major at Yale University, but only began writing fiction during her senior year. She moved to New York after college and took a job writing paperback cover copy at Ballantine Books. She attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop from 1986 to 1988, selling her first short story to The New Yorker a few weeks before receiving her M.F.A. degree.
In 1988 Packer moved to Madison, Wisconsin as a fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. During her two years in Wisconsin she published stories in literary magazines, including the story "Babies," which was included in the 1992 O. Henry Award prize stories collection. The New Yorker story, "Mendocino," became the title story of her first book, Mendocino and Other Stories, published by Chronicle Books in 1994.
Recent career
Packer spent almost 10 years writing The Dive From Clausen's Pier. Geri Thoma of the Elaine Markson Agency agreed to take on the book and sold it almost immediately to the editor Jordan Pavlin at Alfred A. Knopf. It was published in 2002 and became the first selection of the Good Morning America "Read This!" Book Club. It also received a Great Lakes Book Award, an American Library Association Award, and the Kate Chopin Literary Award. The novel was adapted into a 2005 cable television film.
Packer’s next two books were also published by Knopf: a novel, Songs Without Words (2007), and a collection of short fiction, Swim Back to Me (2011). "Things Said or Done," one of the stories in Swim Back to Me, was included in the 2012 O. Henry Award prize stories collection. In 2015 another novel, The Children's Crusade, was published by Scribner.
In addition to fiction, Packer has written essays for the Washington Post, Vogue, Real Simple, and Oprah Magazine. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/13/2015.)
Book Reviews
After the keenly observed realism she demonstrated in her much more penetrating Dive From Clausen's Pier, Ms. Packer this time treats pedestrian, domestic details about her characters strategically, as if they captured physical manifestations of interior currents.... Ms. Packer's most intuitive point her is that mother-daughter dynamics and neediness linger throughout life, even among apparent peers, in ways that become sharper over time.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Packer solidifies the reputation she established in the enormously successful The Dive from Clausen's Pier as an uncannily observant chronicler of contemporary American domestic life. Songs Without Words touches every nerve exposed by the solidly middle-class dilemmas of today's parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers.... Packer is no ironist; she is not Claire Messud or Zadie Smith, whose most recent novels unspool under the cool panoramic gaze of a social critic. The characters in Packer's novels are not so much exposed as they are understood.... Packer is devoted to her characters, and it is her pleasure as a novelist—and ours as her readers—to watch these people move through the intensely familiar and intimate hours of their days and nights...her pursuit is so unnervingly attentive that it becomes revelatory. Middle-of-the-night readers...who cannot put down Songs Without Words will surely look up at the darkest hour with the sense that they are being watched.
Carrie Brown - Washington Post
This time Packer is telling a messier, meandering story about family, friendship, and deperession. The startlingly pointed truths are still there, but the momentum is different. Where Dive hurtled its heroine from inexperience toward maturity, Songs is more of a meditation on the nature of maturity itself.
Janice P. Nimura - Newsday
The psychology is skin deep, but Packer writes about adult female friendship with a nuanced understanding of its emotional intensity.... One of Packer’s strengths as a writer is her ability to subtly shift tone and voice to bring us into the interior of very different characters. The narrative moves with ease.
Lost Angeles Times Book Review
Sometimes whole sections seem like filler, as if this story should have been a novella.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Readers will be pleased to find Packer’s remarkable talent for characterization in the pages of her second novel, Songs Without Words.... In this novel, commonplace events and everyday gestures reveal not only sorrow, but the complex, interior lives of characters. There is no heavy-handed foreshadowing by the author. Instead, every exchange between characters, each fleeting doubt or frail hope, is given equal weight. Relationships fray and falter, love is rekindled or lost, often surprising the characters themselves, and the reader.... If the story sags slightly under the uneven weight of five characters' ruminations,...Lauren’s sections are pitch-perfect.... It is Lauren who gives this novel its enormous heart.”
Charlotte Observer
Packer follows her well-received first novel, The Dive from Clausen's Pier, with a richly nuanced meditation on the place of friendship in women's lives. Liz and Sarabeth's childhood friendship deepened following Sarabeth's mother's suicide when the girls were 16; now the two women are in their 40s and living in the Bay Area. Responsible mother-of-two Liz has come to see eccentric, bohemian Sarabeth, with her tendency to enter into inappropriate relationships with men, as more like another child than as a sister or mutually supportive friend. When Liz's teenage daughter, Lauren, perpetuates a crisis, Liz doubts her parenting abilities; Sarabeth is plunged into uncomfortable memories; and the hidden fragilities of what seemed a steadfast relationship come to the fore. Packer adroitly navigates Lauren's teen despair, Sarabeth's lonely longings and Liz's feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Although Liz's husband, Brody, and other men in the book are less than compelling, Packer gets deep into the perspectives of Liz, Sarabeth and Lauren, and follows out their conflicts with an unsentimental sympathy.
Publishers Weekly
Expanding her canvas from The Dive from Clausen's Pier (2001, etc.), Packer explores a friendship and a family wounded by a teenager's attempted suicide. While she confined herself to the first-person narrator's point of view in her bestselling first novel, here the author persuasively enters the heads of five different people in northern California: Liz and Sarabeth, best friends since the suicide of Sarabeth's mother 30 years ago; Liz's husband, Brody, a business-development executive; their severely depressed 15-year-old, Lauren; and her carefully well-adjusted younger brother, Joe. Sarabeth is unmarried, a designer who gussies up for-sale houses and apartments with custom-made lampshades or pillows. She's the "creative" one, Liz the contented housewife who doesn't mind hand-holding her turbulent friend. But when Lauren slashes her wrists and Sarabeth doesn't call for days after finding out, Liz feels betrayed. Things are also rocky with Brody when Lauren comes home from the hospital; the different approaches the spouses take with their still-raw daughter drive them apart. At first, it's hard to sympathize with Packer's privileged, self-absorbed characters. Lauren seems to be wallowing in her distress; Sarabeth and Liz nurse their grievances instead of talking honestly about them; Brody flings himself into e-mail and business trips; Joe vanishes to soccer games and sleepovers. There isn't a lot of action to grab readers' attention. Slowly and carefully, Packer shows her characters putting their lives back together after a traumatizing blow. Lauren slowly regains her self-esteem and sense of humor; Brody and Liz reaffirm a deep, satisfying marital love; Sarabeth battles depression and makes new friends, understanding that she can't always lean on Liz. The two old friends' moving reconciliation closes a quiet narrative whose emotions, we come to realize, run deep and true. A slight sophomore slump after a pitch-perfect debut, but commendably ambitious and ultimately rewarding.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Ann Packer has been praised for the lifelike quality of her fiction. Do you feel that the friendship depicted here seems especially true to life? Do you find yourself choosing sides with either Liz or Sarabeth?
2. Why does Lauren attempt to kill herself? What are the immediate and the more suppressed causes? How does Lauren herself explain it?
3. Liz tells Brody that she feels completely guilty for Lauren’s suicide attempt. “I know, it sounds crazy,” she says, “but the point is: if it was your fault, then you weren’t powerless—you weren’t at the mercy of stuff just happening.” To which Brody replies: “You’re always going to be at the mercy of stuff just happening, no matter what” [p. 293]. What different ways of looking at life do these two positions represent? To what extent are they “at the mercy of stuff just happening”?
4. Thinking back over her relationship with her daughter, Liz imagines herself “bowing to Lauren, acknowledging Lauren. Had she somehow failed to do that? She couldn’t think of anything more important for a mother to do” [p. 127]. Why would nothing be more important than this kind of acknowledgment of one’s child? Why does Liz choose the word “bowing”?
5. After Lauren has returned from the hospital, Liz admits to Lauren that she and Sarabeth are “having some problems.” After that, Lauren occasionally asks her mother about her relationship with Sarabeth. Do you think Lauren is intentionally pressuring Liz to talk to her? Do you think it’s Lauren’s place to pressure her mother about Sarabeth?
6. Liz and Sarabeth have a long history together. Do you think that, without Lauren’s attempted suicide, Liz and Sarabeth would have ended up in the same place anyway?
7. Why do you think Lauren is drawn to Sarabeth? Do you think it has more to do with Sarabeth’s experience with depression and suicide, or with Sarabeth’s knowledge of art and her less-conventional life? Or something else entirely?
8. Why doesn’t Sarabeth call Liz immediately when she learns of Lauren’s suicide attempt? Is her reaction selfish or merely self-protective?
9. Why does Liz tell Sarabeth, “I’m not your mother” [p. 226]? Is she justified in saying this? How does it affect Sarabeth, immediately and ultimately?
10. Brody describes Sarabeth as “five feet of chaos” [p. 278]. In what ways is this statement true of Sarabeth?
11. What is the effect of tragedy—the suicide of Sarabeth’s mother and Lauren’s attempted suicide—occurring in such seemingly ordinary, and in Lauren’s case loving, families?
12. Near the end of the novel, after Joe has won at poker, he thinks: “The cards didn’t really matter. What mattered was how you played. What mattered was your face” [p. 314]. In what ways might this apply to the lives of the characters in the novel?
13. How are Liz and Brody able to repair their marriage? Why does Lauren’s attempted suicide create such anger and distance between them?
14. What do you think about the hostility between Sarabeth and Brody? Do you think they would have gotten along better if not for their relationships with Liz?
15. How are Liz and Sarabeth able to restore their friendship? Why is the gift of the bench so important?
16. What is the turning point in Lauren’s recovery? What is it that really begins to restore her optimism and interest in life?
17. Songs Without Words, though much of it is concerned with suffering, depression and suicide, ends happily, with the restoration of Liz and Sarabeth’s friendship and Lauren choosing to embrace rather than hide from life. Why does this ending feel right? How does Packer keep the novel from achieving too easy a closure?
18. What does Songs Without Words reveal about both the strength and fragility of human relationships?
(Questions from the publisher.)
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