Songs Without Words (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Packer follows her well-received first novel, The Dive from Clausen's Pier, with a richly nuanced meditation on the place of friendship in women's lives. Liz and Sarabeth's childhood friendship deepened following Sarabeth's mother's suicide when the girls were 16; now the two women are in their 40s and living in the Bay Area. Responsible mother-of-two Liz has come to see eccentric, bohemian Sarabeth, with her tendency to enter into inappropriate relationships with men, as more like another child than as a sister or mutually supportive friend. When Liz's teenage daughter, Lauren, perpetuates a crisis, Liz doubts her parenting abilities; Sarabeth is plunged into uncomfortable memories; and the hidden fragilities of what seemed a steadfast relationship come to the fore. Packer adroitly navigates Lauren's teen despair, Sarabeth's lonely longings and Liz's feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Although Liz's husband, Brody, and other men in the book are less than compelling, Packer gets deep into the perspectives of Liz, Sarabeth and Lauren, and follows out their conflicts with an unsentimental sympathy. (Sept.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Carrie Brown

Ann Packer has been looking in our windows. The majority of readers of contemporary literary fiction in America -- especially fiction written by women -- are women themselves, and in her new novel, Songs Without Words, Packer has tapped into the things that worry many of these readers: love and satisfaction in their relationships, the emotional and psychological health of their offspring, the terrible possibility of spiritual and familial dissolution. 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.

Packer is no ironist; she is not Claire Messud or Zadie Smith, whose most recent novels unspool under the cool panoramic gaze of a social critic. 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 first paragraph of the novel is one of those lovely moments in fiction when a writer conjures in just a few sentences, with just a few images, the entire universe of the story that is about to unfold. The scene feels both like a presage of things to come and, in its quiet, painterly composition, like a metaphor -- of what, at first, we are not exactly sure, of course, but the world Packer evokes here is the familiar beauty-crossed-with-loneliness of the suburban evening. (Countless writers have been drawn to this moment, most famously perhaps James Agee in the opening scene of his novel A Death in the Family). Here is Packer's beginning:

"Each evening, the streetlights came on at dusk, and the view out the window changed, from barely glowing kitchens and TV rooms to the houses that contained them, and to the trees that sheltered the houses. It seemed to Sarabeth that for a little while there was a kind of balance out there, an equilibrium. But then, quickly, darkness came down from the sky, and soon the lit rooms returned to prominence, and finally everything else was black, and the world seemed limited to a few bright windows on a street in Palo Alto."

Sarabeth and Liz grew up across the street from each other, their girlhood friendship deepened by the tragedy of Sarabeth's mother's suicide when the girls were in high school. Packer offers their history in a brief prologue, and the first chapter of the novel finds Liz married with two teenaged children and contentedly immersed in her roles as wife and mother.

Sarabeth, on the other hand, is still single, uncertain about her life and pursuing a career as a house stager, someone who creates the ambiance of cozy domesticity in homes people are trying to sell, a job that seems like a painful destiny for someone whose own childhood was interrupted by domestic tragedy.

Of the two, Liz appears to have it all, but when her 15-year-old daughter, Lauren -- the novel's most heartbreaking portrait -- falls into the grip of adolescent depression, Liz's world falls apart. And so does Sarabeth's; Lauren's unhappiness brings Sarabeth dangerously near to the memory of her own mother, and her retreat from Liz is both cowardly and -- this is Packer's generosity at work -- completely understandable. The only thing that can drive old friends apart more surely than death is unhappiness, and it seems that Liz and Sarabeth's estrangement will separate them permanently. "They all seemed irrevocably distant, the people she knew," Sarabeth thinks, "as far away as Earth was from the moon." There are some novels that show us the "other," and in doing so expand our ideas about humanity. Songs Without Words is a novel that shows us -- tenderly, and with a full awareness of the precious dignity and indignity of human experience -- ourselves.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (September 4, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375412816
• ISBN-13: 978-0375412813
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #379,953 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Songs played on the black notes of life., September 12, 2007

By	G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"God, it was the most ordinary things that caused the greatest misery."

In Ann Packer's compelling second novel, Songs Without Words, Liz and Sarabeth are lifelong friends now in their 40s. Both live in the Bay Area, Liz with her husband, Brody, and Sarabeth single in Berkeley. Liz and Brody have two children, Lauren and Joe. Despite a family life that looks like suburban bliss on the surface, 16-year-old Lauren suffers from teenage angst, self-doubt, and depression. Her parents are too busy to notice. Liz is a bit like Mrs. Dalloway, a stay-at-home mom living her life on autopilot, preoccupied with crafts, yoga and cooking. (If not Mrs. Dalloway, then think Martha Stewart.) It soon becomes evident that Packer is playing songs on the black notes of life here when Lauren attempts suicide, an event that tests the dynamics between Liz and Sarabeth to their breaking points.

Lauren's suicide attempt derails the relationship between Liz and Sarabeth--and this becomes the most engaging plot twist in the novel. Liz is unexpectedly forced out of her comfort zone, and now feels threatened by Sarabeth's bohemian eccentricities. She doesn't need another child in her life. After Sarabeth's own mother committed suicide during her junior year in high school in 1976, she lived with Liz's family in Palo Alto. Clearly, she has unresolved mother issues, and seems to rely on Liz as her primary source of emotional support. Like Lauren, she encounters difficulties in navigating through her day-to-day life. She has struggled in her relationships with men, sabotages her own chances at happiness, and never seems at easy with her life in Berkeley--a revealing stroke showing that our childhoods follow us into adulthood. Packer taps into hard truths about suffering here, and by the end of the novel Lauren's suicide attempt becomes the catalyst to transform the relationship between Liz and Sarabeth in unexpected ways.

Several early Amazon reviewers have simply dismissed this book as "boring." With all respect to them, I think this says more about the reviewer's expectations than the actual book. It kept me so engaged I couldn't put it down. Boring? I say read the novel and decide for yourself.

G. Merritt

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing Premise Becomes Boring Novel, November 9, 2007

By	Susan Y. Schoonover (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I was anxious to read SONGS WITHOUT WORDS since I greatly enjoyed Ann Packer's first novel THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER. "SONGS" starts well with a flashback to 1976 a time when Sarabeth and Liz, the two lead female characters, are best friends and high school students. Sarabeth is actually living with Liz's family in their Palo Alto home as her life was disrupted when her mother committed suicide and her father moved back east. We flash forward thirty years to present day Northern California and find Liz is now a typical suburban housewife with a successful husband in the high tech industry and a teenage son and daughter. Sarabeth is still single in her mid to late forties doing some free lance creative things like "staging" houses for realtors, making lampshades and we presume often living off the inheritance from her deceased parents. Sarabeth is also mourning being dumped by her latest lover who happened to be married with kids and trying to come to terms with some realities about her life. Meanwhile Liz's life is not quite as perfect as it seems as her teenage daughter Lauren is becoming increasingly depressed and will soon make a stupid choice that will disrupt her whole family as well as her mother's friendship with her oldest friend Sarabeth.

While Packer is a gifted writer and keen observer of upper middle class suburban life this book soon becomes tedious and boring. Sarabeth and Liz are well developed sympathetic characters but the pace of the book is so slow and the plot so plodding the reader soon loses interest in them. Liz's daughter Lauren and her high schoool experience are interesting but I would have liked more of a back story as to why she is so depressed. The last third of the book is so incrediably sluggish I felt like celebrating when I reached the final word.

67 of 89 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Agonizingly boring..., September 8, 2007

By	M. Nichols (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I really should have known better than to read "Songs Without Words." I bought it for two reasons: its arresting cover (outstanding design) and the promise that it was the story of a friendship torn asunder. As a major Jane Hamilton fan, I was hoping for something like "A Map of the World." Let this be a cautionary tale to avoid books based on covers and reviews. Instead, consider this: I remember being bored stiff by "Dive from Clausen Pier" -- I couldn't get beyond page 50. If you had that same reaction, don't read this book.

I finished this one (because I made the mistake of buying it hardcover) but it was a slog. Packer greatly overdoes the quotidian detail. Liz and Sarabeth are two of the most boring characters I have ever encountered in fiction, so reading about every leaf on their porches was agonizing. The most exciting thing about Liz is that she eats challah toast for breakfast and does yoga. Let's repeat that again: challah toast and yoga. Packer herself repeats those details about seven times in one chapter. (And the name Sarabeth just made me want to eat overpriced chocolate chip muffins.) Sarabeth, painted in reviews as a wildchild, is just a single woman with a penchant for married men. In addition to being dull characters, their friendship has no spark. Where is the humor, the fun, the inside jokes? As for the twist that threatens their friendship, it is so obvious it's almost funny.

The world badly needs fiction that honestly portrays women's lives. "Songs Without Words" may be honest, but it's boring as hell.