Customer Reviews

Songs Without Words

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

"Songs Without Words," by Ann Packer, is a realistic novel dealing with the interior lives of five members of an extended suburban American family during a period of prolonged psychological crisis. This contemporary Bay Area family consists of two branches. The more normal and apparently contented Palo Alto branch consists of Liz, Brody, and their two teenage children, Joe and Lauren. Across the Bay in Berkeley lives Sarabeth, the second part of this extended family. Sarabeth is Liz' virtual sister and life-long best friend. In midlife, Sarabeth is still alone and lonely--a woman with a long history of sabotaging her long-term happiness though repeated dead-end relationships with married men. Liz and Sarabeth have been inseparable since their teens, when Sarabeth's mother committed suicide and she came to live in Liz' family while her father pursued his career and a new life on the East Coast. Their sisterly bond is strong but unhealthy. It is built on a shaky foundation of one-way mental support--it is Liz who is always on the giving end, providing Sarabeth with the constant emotional support her friend requires to maintain emotional balance.

This extended family is shattered when Lauren attempts suicide. No one sees it coming, and Lauren's tragic action throws the entire family dynamic into chaos. Everyone flounders and struggles to regain emotional equilibrium. All their relationships are derailed--some far more than others. In particular, the relationship between Liz and Sarabeth implodes. Liz is no longer able to tend to Sarabeth's emotional needs, and Sarabeth is too emotionally unstable to provide Liz with the emotional support she needs during this time of crisis. We watch as all the family relationships disintegrate and then slowly rebuild. By the end of the novel, most relationships have reformed along stronger and more emotionally healthy lines. It is a frustratingly slow but fascinating process to watch.

During the course of the novel, the author takes us deep into the interior lives of the five main characters--Liz, Brody, Joe, Lauren, and Sarabeth. She takes us into their minds and we observe, in painstaking and often excruciating detail, how each person navigates the psychological minefields that follow in the wake of Lauren's attempted suicide.

The book starts and ends with the relationship between Liz and Sarabeth. But two-thirds of the book is taken up with Lauren's descent into, and eventually out of, major depression. For me, this was the most realistic and interesting part. It is also interesting to observe Sarabeth barely clinging to sanity as she navigates the terror of living life without Liz' emotional support. The author has a keen understanding of clinical depression, and her depiction of this process is wholly authentic and convincing.

This has been marketed as a book dealing with a derailed relationship between two close friends. I believe that is misleading. Perhaps the publishers thought it would scare readers away if they knew that this book was primarily about depressive personalities--about the interior mental landscapes of those fragile individuals genetically wired for depression, people like Lauren and Sarabeth. It is their stories that dominate the novel. The book is primarily about their disordered thought processes--about how these unhealthy thoughts work to sabotage their happiness in everyday small ways.

Make no mistake: this is a book about depression. It is effective and well done, but it is not an easy book to read. Not much happens, and what does occur...well, it is so over-the-top with mundane detail that the novel is realistic to a fault--it is a bit like what it might be to watch a non-stop unedited reality TV program dealing with a dysfunctional family in crisis. One gains a lot of insight by taking a journey like this deep into the chaotic, anxious, guilt-ridden, and often totally disordered thought processes of individuals in crisis, but the journey is wrought with frustration and as compelling as it is tedious.

Personally, I found this novel satisfying and worth the effort. I would recommend it to readers who are strongly motivated to improve their understanding about the inner workings of the depressive mind.

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.

I agree with so many other reviewers here: this was not a very good book. The idea of the story intrigued me but the two women were uninteresting and even a little annoying. But more than the women or the plot, what bothered me the most was the poor writing. The author writes paragraphs of excessive detail that don't do anything at all for the story, don't tell me about a character, don't move the story forward, nothing. More annoying than that are sentences like this: "Esther was an elderly woman Sarabeth had sort of adopted." Huh? Who is saying this? This is like some kind of authorial intrusion to explain things to the reader, because she couldn't do it within dialogue. Also the entire first paragraph of chapter three which explains the company Brody works for - I kept wanting to shout, "Show, don't tell!" - one of the very first lessons in any creative writing class.

Perhaps this book was rushed into print. Perhaps, as someone else suggested, she needed more help from an editor. I've heard that the Claussen Pier book is good and I might borrow it from the library to find out. But this one? Naw. Not a good book.

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.

This novel is a Great Pretender. At first I thought it was going to be about a friendship between women who shared a childhood but took distinct paths in adulthood. Liz, from a stable family with loving parents, marries and has two kids; Sarabeth, her friend from across the street --- who came to live with Liz's family when her own mother killed herself and her father left town --- is a single freelancer who, after a year, is still mourning a failed affair with a married man.

Gradually, though, I realized that Ann Packer's true theme is darker. As Sarabeth says (with an odd, Yoda-like cadence) of two of her favorite novels, madame bovary and anna karenina, "Suicide, these books were about. Not adultery." SONGS WITHOUT WORDS, to my mind, is also about suicide, not friendship. Both Sarabeth and Lauren, Liz's teenaged daughter, hear the "distant music, familiar and sad" of longings that are impossible to articulate; both are subject to furious tears, days spent in bed, the lure of non-existence.

I don't think it is giving away any secrets to tell you that the main event of the book is Lauren's suicide attempt and the way that the family is changed by it. Liz and her husband, Cody, are devastated by guilt and pain; Sarabeth, meanwhile, is unmoored both by memories of Lorelei, her lost mother, and by Liz's sudden absence from her life. The two friends are strangely unable to connect over this crisis --- or perhaps not so strangely, because they are accustomed to a dynamic in which Sarabeth is almost like the family's second daughter. At one point Liz says angrily, "I'm not your mother." But later she acknowledges that Lorelei had been "some kind of not-mother, some kind of anti-mother" and that "it was almost criminal, that Sarabeth had been forced to do without."

The irony of this, of course, is that Liz, following the pattern of her own devoted mother, has paid every attention to her kids --- or so she thought --- and Lauren still falls into a near-fatal chasm of depression and self-loathing. Is Packer saying that mental states have a life of their own, or that parents can never entirely protect their kids?

Either way, SONGS WITHOUT WORDS is a book whose characters are divided as clearly as a two-lane highway. Liz, Brody and their son, Joe, are "normals" who have been blindsided by Lauren's suicide attempt and shocked into an altered state, less warm and fuzzy. Sarabeth and Lauren, in contrast, have always had to struggle for happiness, clarity and meaning; they must fight against a constant undertow of isolation and despair (Lauren's high school agonies are particularly vivid). Sarabeth doesn't toy with suicide --- her memories of Lorelei are too disturbing --- but she does succumb to a numbing retreat from reality; with no school to drop out of, she drops out of her own life. While I think Packer meant to give each side equal weight, for me Sarabeth and Lauren dominate the novel --- they are easily the more substantial, engaging characters. Liz is too earnest, even in her grief, to move me much, while Brody and Joe are too opaque.

One of the compelling things about THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER was the stark moral choice that confronted the heroine when her fiancé was confined to a wheelchair after a swimming accident. SONGS WITHOUT WORDS doesn't have that sharpness of focus, which is why, more than the earlier novel, it sometimes gets bogged down in the sheer density of prose. The characters' lengthy internal dialogues, peppered with rhetorical questions, attempt to achieve texture through the cumulative effect of many words rather than the dead-on rightness of a few. I think a stern editorial hand would have been useful to help the good "bones" of the book emerge more effectively.

On the other hand, the very generosity of Packer's vision --- the meticulous details of family life, adolescent crushes and professional subcultures (Brody and Sarabeth's jobs are described with care and intelligence) --- has a certain emotional power. It is a leisurely approach to storytelling, more like a 19th-century novel in some ways (classic fiction is a constant reference point for Sarabeth) than a 21st-century one. Absorbing rather than suspenseful, it draws us into its universe and persuades us that it is real.

Come to think of it, it was kind of interesting to read a book in which the central friendship is absent (for a good two-thirds of SONGS WITHOUT WORDS, communication between Sarabeth and Liz are stalled; they don't even speak on the phone). So often we assume that friends can survive anything without much mutual nurturing; Packer implies that these relationships are more fragile than we think. She also seems to suggest that friendship, at its best, gives us a sense of ourselves that is irreplaceable --- as important as the love we get from a spouse, child or parent, and somehow purer.

I don't think I'll let on whether Sarabeth and Liz find their happy ending. Read the book and find out for yourself.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

I'm so frustrated with "Songs Without Words" that I'm writing a review before I've even finished the book (I'm a couple of chapters from the end). I was almost to the end before I realized I was frustrated, bored, and depressed by it. The story goes nowhere! And it takes a really long time to do it!

I read "The Dive from Clausen's Pier" about a year ago and liked it enough to finish it. I didn't love it, but I had forgotten just how blah I felt about it--until now. The premise of her first book was great--a very promising story--but the story lacked both action and resolution, and I lacked compassion for the main character. Actually, that pretty well sums up how I feel about "Songs Without Words." Yet, I don't exactly hate it; it's more like I feel sorry for it. I feel like the author missed the mark. The book has potential that, unfortunately, will never be realized since you don't exactly get a do-over after publication. In other words: it could have used better editing. For starters.

One of the main problems with the book, if not the biggest problem, is that it lacks character development. We get background information on events that have shaped some characters' personalities and lives (like Sarabeth's mom's suicide, and how that affects both Sarabeth and Liz) but there are gaping holes regarding other characters' problems--like why does Liz's daughter, Lauren, hate herself so much? I kept expecting there to be a defining moment or some event that explains WHY Lauren's so unhappy. But no. She just hates herself (typical teenage angst?), and then she attempts suicide. As a person who is very interested in why and how things happen, these types of plot holes are driving me crazy. Very late in the book, there is a tiny paragraph about how Liz realizes she could have been a better mother if she had spent less time acting as a mother to Sarabeth. Is that the author's attempt to tie together loose ends regarding Lauren's problems? I can't tell.

Others have called the book dull. Yeah, it is, but there are fleeting moments where it's not--and that is why I'm giving this book two stars. I adore some of Packer's descriptions regarding her characters' behaviors. They act/react the way any of us would, and that's endearing. So they do seem human--but only briefly. Then Packer reverts back to lengthy descriptions about, say, how badly Sarabeth has to pee (seriously, an entire paragraph devoted to her bladder). Or how much it's raining, or how dilapidated Sarabeth's house is. The juxtaposition of moments of insight and prosaic nonsense are maddening. The story lacks follow through and flow. Each chapter is like a snapshot of a day in the characters' lives, with very little tying the story or time lines together. Though they do have moments of likability, the characters are ultimately so superficial and underdeveloped that I'm having trouble caring about any of them. And they never do anything differently or out of character. They don't grow. They're boring.

I could be generous and say that I think Packer is trying to demonstrate that her characters are everyday people living normal lives like the rest of us, and her writing reflects that; however, 1. ordinariness and inaction do not make for a compelling story and 2. I believe what's actually happening is that Packer's writing, along with her character and plot development, is just lazy. And that is why this book fails. Her descriptions of rote activities and observations are completely boring. It's been the random moments of insight into human behavior--and my hope that the book will improve (clearly it hasn't)--that has kept me reading. I figure I'm almost done; I should just finish the book. That said, this book is an incoherent mess that I wouldn't recommend reading.

I was disappointed by the novel, Songs without Words. I kept reading and waiting for something to actually happen. It seemed to me the author spent a lot of time telling us about the most unimportant things over and over without a reason. Why was there so much information about Brody's work or sore shoulder or what they ate for breakfast? I kept waiting for something important to happen to Sarabeth who seemed to me to be more depressed or equally as depressed as Lauren. But nothing did.And the fact that she existed just making lamp shades seemed far fetched. If this book was about the friendship between two women, I did not get that at all.

After hearing and reading rave reviews about Ann Packer's award winning, best-selling 2002 novel, "The Dive From Clausen's Pier", I thought I'd give this book a whirl (even though I had read that this one didn't quite measure up to the earlier work). When I finished it, I wasn't sure how I felt about it. It felt muddled and slapped together, with too many loose ends, too many characters introduced for seemingly no good reason, and too many subplots that went nowhere. Packer's grammar is atrocious, her vocabulary is questionable, and her sexual interludes are strangely discomforting and misogynistic. The protagonists in this book are both weak, disorganized, and floundering in their relationships with other women, and are either married to or become involved with childish, self-centered, emotionally stunted men. They are both in their mid-forties, but don't have much going for them. I was ready to just pan the book and get on with it!
I read "The Dive From Clausen's Pier" to perhaps give me better perspective on Packer's writing, but found it to be every bit as frustrating as her latest novel, with all the same deficiencies.
A hallmark of Packer's writing is said to be that she "reveals the inner lives of women". I actually found the supporting characters in both her books to be far more interesting and successful than the so-called protagonists. In "Songs Without Words", the true emotional center of the story turns out to be the 15 year old daughter of one of the main characters. This girl, Lauren, is deeply unhappy as the book begins and tries to commit suicide. After long months of psychotherapy and group interaction with other troubled teenagers, however, it is she who learns from her mistakes, grows emotionally in her relationships with others, evinces leadership qualities, and is quietly heroic. There is hope for her future, whether her mother and her erstwhile best friend can ever "get it together" or not.
I cannot recommend Packer's work overall, but reading her books has taught me to look beyond the superficial to the supporting roles for the best and most inspiring character development.

I am an avid reader and rarely do I not finish a book, even if I am not particularly enjoying it. Unfortunately I got close to finishing this one but decided life is too short to read boring books. It just did'nt go anywhere. I kept waiting for something to happen. It sounded good on the back cover blurb but there was just nothing to it. The characters were not interesting in any way. I would'nt be in a hurry to read another Ann Packer book.

A few years back I read "Dive From Clausen's Pier" and enjoyed it, which is why I picked up this book. However I was very disappointed with this book. First off, Ann Packer needs a better editor! This was so poorly written in areas that I had to read and re-read to try and figure out what she was saying or trying to say. (And I am an avid reader so this does NOT happen often.)

In addition, I didn't care for the story and I really have no idea what she was trying to accomplish or say with this novel! While it was an interesting premise and it intrigued me...I just couldn't relate to the characters at all, well, mainly Sarabeth. But since she was sort of the main focus, it just ruined the story for me. Like I mentioned, I am just sort of left wondering what this author was trying to say here, what was the point? Overall, it left me pretty confused. I won't pick up another novel from this author.