Improvement

Winner of a couple of prestigious awards, Joan Silber's Improvement is called a novel, but is really a series of connected stories, a sort of "tag, you're it" where one or more characters from one story are followed in the next. I love that kind of structure, and the writing in Improvement is just fine, but it didn't hit me on a gut level.

We start with Reyna, a young woman living in Upper Manhattan. She's dating a guy who is in prison, and has a kooky aunt who spent a long time married to a guy in Turkey. The boyfriend wants her to participate in a scheme to smuggle cigarettes up from Virginia, but she demurs, so a guy who can't really drive that well ends up getting killed in an accident.

We then meet his sort-of girlfriend in Richmond, then the truck driver who accidentally killed the guy, go back to the aunt in her early days in Turkey, then a trio of German artifact hunters, and so on. I've heard of plays that allow you to follow a character in a kind of create-your-own-adventure, and this is the literary version, though there is no choice.

The central characters, who show up more than once, are Reyna and her aunt, Kiki, and the central objects are Turkish rugs, which end up helping characters in need. The book goes all over the place, from Cappadocia to the Catskills to Berlin to an eyebrow salon in New York, but I never got a firm grip on the characters.

The book has something of a droll sense of humor. Reyna is presented as somewhat pathetic, even to herself: "I was out of my depth. I was a dopey girl with a sun hat." Some characters appear like comets, only to disappear, such as Lynette, the eyebrow stylist who embodies the cliche of the bossy black woman. I think the best stand-alone story is about the truck driver, who is happily married to his second wife, but having an affair with his first.

The title can mean many things, but is presented in the meaning of making one's situation better. "The point was to ask for strength. Improvement wasn’t coming any other way. She was doing this almost every night and there was an aftereffect that pleased her." In what may be an intended twist of irony, most of these characters don't improve.