SECRETS OF HAPPINESS

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 aperçus 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.