This
novel is a Great Pretender. At first I thought it was going to be
about a friendship between women who shared a childhood but took
distinct paths in adulthood. Liz, from a stable family with loving
parents, marries and has two kids; Sarabeth, her friend from across
the street --- who came to live with Liz's family when her own
mother killed herself and her father left town --- is a single
freelancer who, after a year, is still mourning a failed affair
with a married man.

Gradually, though, I realized that Ann Packer's true theme is
darker. As Sarabeth says (with an odd, Yoda-like cadence) of two of
her favorite novels, madame bovary and anna karenina, "Suicide,
these books were about. Not adultery." SONGS WITHOUT WORDS, to my
mind, is also about suicide, not friendship. Both Sarabeth and
Lauren, Liz's teenaged daughter, hear the "distant music, familiar
and sad" of longings that are impossible to articulate; both are
subject to furious tears, days spent in bed, the lure of
non-existence.

I don't think it is giving away any secrets to tell you that the
main event of the book is Lauren's suicide attempt and the way that
the family is changed by it. Liz and her husband, Cody, are
devastated by guilt and pain; Sarabeth, meanwhile, is unmoored both
by memories of Lorelei, her lost mother, and by Liz's sudden
absence from her life. The two friends are strangely unable to
connect over this crisis --- or perhaps not so strangely, because
they are accustomed to a dynamic in which Sarabeth is almost like
the family's second daughter. At one point Liz says angrily, "I'm
not your mother." But later she acknowledges that Lorelei had been
"some kind of not-mother, some kind of anti-mother" and that "it
was almost criminal, that Sarabeth had been forced to do
without."

The irony of this, of course, is that Liz, following the pattern of
her own devoted mother, has paid every attention to her kids --- or
so she thought --- and Lauren still falls into a near-fatal chasm
of depression and self-loathing. Is Packer saying that mental
states have a life of their own, or that parents can never entirely
protect their kids?

Either way, SONGS WITHOUT WORDS is a book whose characters are
divided as clearly as a two-lane highway. Liz, Brody and their son,
Joe, are "normals" who have been blindsided by Lauren's suicide
attempt and shocked into an altered state, less warm and fuzzy.
Sarabeth and Lauren, in contrast, have always had to struggle for
happiness, clarity and meaning; they must fight against a constant
undertow of isolation and despair (Lauren's high school agonies are
particularly vivid). Sarabeth doesn't toy with suicide --- her
memories of Lorelei are too disturbing --- but she does succumb to
a numbing retreat from reality; with no school to drop out of, she
drops out of her own life. While I think Packer meant to give each
side equal weight, for me Sarabeth and Lauren dominate the novel
--- they are easily the more substantial, engaging characters. Liz
is too earnest, even in her grief, to move me much, while Brody and
Joe are too opaque.

One of the compelling things about THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER was
the stark moral choice that confronted the heroine when her
fiancé was confined to a wheelchair after a swimming accident.
SONGS WITHOUT WORDS doesn't have that sharpness of focus, which is
why, more than the earlier novel, it sometimes gets bogged down in
the sheer density of prose. The characters' lengthy internal
dialogues, peppered with rhetorical questions, attempt to achieve
texture through the cumulative effect of many words rather than the
dead-on rightness of a few. I think a stern editorial hand would
have been useful to help the good "bones" of the book emerge more
effectively.

On the other hand, the very generosity of Packer's vision --- the
meticulous details of family life, adolescent crushes and
professional subcultures (Brody and Sarabeth's jobs are described
with care and intelligence) --- has a certain emotional power. It
is a leisurely approach to storytelling, more like a 19th-century
novel in some ways (classic fiction is a constant reference point
for Sarabeth) than a 21st-century one. Absorbing rather than
suspenseful, it draws us into its universe and persuades us that it
is real.

Come to think of it, it was kind of interesting to read a
book in which the central friendship is absent (for a good
two-thirds of SONGS WITHOUT WORDS, communication between Sarabeth
and Liz are stalled; they don't even speak on the phone). So often
we assume that friends can survive anything without much mutual
nurturing; Packer implies that these relationships are more fragile
than we think. She also seems to suggest that friendship, at its
best, gives us a sense of ourselves that is irreplaceable --- as
important as the love we get from a spouse, child or parent, and
somehow purer.

I don't think I'll let on whether Sarabeth and Liz find their happy
ending. Read the book and find out for yourself.