A Book To Linger Over
WOSU Book Critic Kassie Rose reviews "The Size of the World" by Joan Silber.

by Kassie Rose

Joan Silber's previous books include Household Words, which was awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Ideas of Heaven, which was a 2004 National Book Award Finalist. This summer her new novel – The Size of the World – is in bookstores.

One of the characters in Joan Silber's new novel is the daughter of Italian immigrants living in
New Jersey. Her name is Viana, and she decides to marry a Muslim doctor from Thailand and move to his country. Her parents disapprove and to their narrow-minded remarks she replies: "You think your own tiny corner is everything, but it isn't."

With this scene and many others, Silber drives home the book's important message that countries are sections of a connected whole, not isolated entities.

Six chapters divide the book described on the cover as a novel but in reality the chapters are six stories linked by characters appearing in minor roles in some, and narrating others.

In the first story, an American engineer named Toby is sent to Vietnam in the 1960s to figure out why U.S. military planes are malfunctioning. He writes longing letters to his high school girlfriend – Kit – but then he marries a Thai woman named Toon and settles in Bangkok.

Kit narrates the next chapter. It's not a story about Toby and Kit rather about Kit becoming a hippie and living in Mexico.

Corinna, a woman who joins her successful tin-prospecting brother, Owen, in Thailand, narrates the next chapter. Her story takes place in the 1920s about living in Southeast Asia.

Corinna and Owen will connect to Toon through a Thai man named Zain who is the grandfather of Viana's Muslim husband.

Viana is Toon's best friend.

All of this seems tangled in the telling but the crisscrossing of characters' over a span of 20th century time and landscape works well under Silber's crafting.

Occasionally the sameness of her thoughtful tone drove me to put the book down for an air-gasping pause, but Silber consistently lured me back with her siren-like storytelling.

She writes with an eye toward spirituality and that, too, drew me in, causing me to linger over the meaning of her scenes, such as when the American Toby, in Thailand, rages over the choice of his son to become a monk. He exclaims to Toon: "If we were home, he'd be doing something for money, he wouldn't be trying to humble himself." Within his angered confusion, Toby realizes he understands nothing and because Silber allows the scene to stand without elaboration, we see immediately how profoundly Toby has strayed from his life's intent.

Silber, though, achieves her intent with these richly textured stories, reminding us that the size of the world isn't measured in distance rather by what we do and how we think.

Corinna, whose heart forever remains in Thailand, says: "My father believed that a person who was at his ease in the woods could never be at a loss anywhere else – not in a company's office and not at a full-dress ball – because he would have a sense of the wider reaches of life."

"The Size of the World" by Joan Silber is published by W. W. Norton & Company.

WOSU Book Critic Kassie Rose can be heard Mondays at 12:35pm during NPR's "Day To Day" on WOSU 820.

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