Ann Packer has a new book out. Packer is the author of 2003’s The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, which was a book club favorite for many months. I read it and remember the plot – college sweethearts break up after the boyfriend is paralyzed as the result of a dive from a bridge into shallow water. I don’t remember much else about the book, though. Entertaining read, but that’s about it.
Her new book is Songs Without Words. The Washington Post reviewed it on Sunday:
Songs Without Words describes a childhood friendship tested by the challenges of adult lives that bear the friends along separate paths. 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. There are no wars or plagues here, no suicide bombers or political turmoil. Instead, there is the fraught landscape of suburban life with its troubling questions about marriage, parenthood, friendship and fulfillment.
The characters in Packer’s novels are not so much exposed as they are understood — understood and seen, in all the psychological sense of that word. 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, spooning coffee into the Krups, taking a bath, crawling into bed. Packer follows them from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom (and to the car and the grocery store and Starbucks and the mall), and her pursuit is so unnervingly attentive that it becomes revelatory. Middle-of-the-night readers — and there will be lots of them — who cannot put down Songs Without Words will surely look up at the darkest hour with the sense that they are being watched.
The book is about two old friends – Liz has teenage children and Sarabeth, whose mother killed herself when she was in high school, is unmarried and at a career crossroads. When Liz’s daughter is diagnosed with adolescent depression, the friendship is strained as old memories are unearthed and distance sets in.
However.
Kristin at Books for Breakfast, whose opinion I generally agree with, wrote this:
First, may I say that The Dive from Clausen’s Pier was brilliant.
So, is this the "sophomore slump"? I didn’t have this on my list of to-reads, but Clausen’s Pier stuck with me for so long that I immediately scooped this up at the library.
Liz and Sarabeth live in the SF Bay area and – surprise! – have been friends since puberty. Events in Liz’s life lead her to lean on Sarabeth, but Sarabeth can’t deliver those friendly feelings.
Blah, blah, can’t even write an interesting post about this book.
1.0 out of 5.0
Has anyone out there read this book yet? Let me know what you thought.