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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
May 2021, 288 pages
Paperback:
Jun 2022, 288 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Elisabeth Herschbach
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When a man discovers his father in New York has long had another, secret, family - a wife and two kids - the interlocking fates of both families lead to surprise loyalties, love triangles, and a reservoir of inner strength.
Ethan, a young lawyer in New York, learns that his father has long kept a second family—a Thai wife and two kids living in Queens. In the aftermath of this revelation, Ethan's mother spends a year working abroad, returning much changed, as events introduce her to the other wife. Across town, Ethan's half brothers are caught in their own complicated journeys: one brother's penchant for minor delinquency has escalated, and the other must travel to Bangkok to bail him out, while the bargains their mother has struck about love and money continue to shape their lives.
As Ethan finds himself caught in a love triangle of his own, the interwoven fates of these two households elegantly unfurl to encompass a woman rallying to help an ill brother with an unreliable lover and a filmmaker with a girlhood spent in Nepal. Evoking a generous and humane spirit, and a story that ranges over three continents, Secrets of Happiness elucidates the ways people marshal the resources at hand to forge their own forms of joy.
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Once a student of the great short story writer Grace Paley, Silber displays a similar talent for conveying the voice of her characters, for weaving together offhand details that capture the texture of their lives. Secrets of Happiness doesn't have the sort of cohesive unity one expects from a book billed as a novel. Although Ethan returns as narrator in the seventh and final chapter, bringing us full circle, by then too many other characters and too many other tangents have intervened to give us any sense of closure. Perhaps that, however, is precisely Silber's point. If the book offers any answer to the question of happiness, it is that we should not expect any grand unifying narratives or crowning revelations...continued
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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Herschbach).
Ann Patchett
Secrets of Happiness unfolds across families and lovers, across time and expectations, across the country and across the world, and the bigger it gets, the more it shows how deeply connected we are. Joan Silber writes with a frankness and freshness that draws the reader closer with every page. It would be impossible to overstate just how good this book is.
In Joan Silber's Secrets of Happiness, Ethan's father, Gil, has a lucrative career in the women's clothing industry, frequently jetting off to parts of Asia to oversee the outsourcing of production. Elsewhere in the book, a character named Bud takes a job with an organization in Cambodia campaigning to improve working conditions in garment factories, reminding us of the flip side of Gil's success—the cheap labor that drives the profits of clothing companies like his.
In a bid to maximize profits, Western fashion retailers began outsourcing in the 1970s, offshoring garment and textile manufacturing to countries with low overhead costs, particularly in Asia. Today, almost 60 percent of the world's textiles and clothing are ...
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