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Songs Without Words Review"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.Songs Without Words Overview
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