By Albert Stern / BJV Editor

Roberta Silman’s latest book, Heart-work, collects short stories that the author wrote over the past 50 years, most of them published in major magazines or winners of prestigious awards. The Great Barrington resident – who has been honored with fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts – has published six previous volumes of fiction for adults and two children’s books, and is a prolific reviewer of books, as well.

The stories are imbued with the kinds of preoccupations prevalent in the fiction published during the latter decades of the William Shawn era at The New Yorker, a magazine in which Silman’s stories have appeared (although none of those have been republished in Heart-work). The characters are almost all well-off, highly-educated, curious, insightful, credentialed, well-spoken, talented, and cosmopolitan. Their ranks include writers, publishers of literary journals, academics who teach Jonathan Swift and the French symbolists at Stanford, theatrical directors, music critic, and other people who make a living in rarefied fields; moreover, they mostly seem to be adept and successful at what they do. They enjoy nice things and have developed tastes that can discern what things are truly nice. They read the New York Times and go to art museums and classical music concerts. They reside in impressive New York City apartments (where perhaps an original Mary Cassatt painting might hang on the wall) and fine country homes (some in the Berkshires), and have traveled the world. An aura of generational wealth hovers over the proceedings, and none of Silman’s characters seem particularly worried that somehow their pleasing lifestyles will somehow evaporate.

Yet it remains true that into each life some rain must fall. Silman’s skill as a writer is her subtlety - troubles descend upon her characters as gentle showers rather than in cascading torrents. Nevertheless, their woes accumulate. Toward the end of each story, challenges and dilemmas that might be have only been hinted at or talked around are clarified. Silman, however, usually leaves the reader with the sense that there is more to come in each story – but for the most part, the stories close before a moment comes to crisis, leaving the reader with a sense of how her protagonists might navigate those crises when they arrive.

The stories to which I responded to included “Tightrope,” about a once-promising poet, Kate, who has left New York City behind to raise a family on a hardscrabble Virginia farm. She returns to the city to provide end-of-life care for her college mentor, Professor Henry Nossiter, who she feels she may have disappointed with her life choices. Through Kate, Silman deftly captures the feelings a former city dweller who has become accustomed to rural life and its open spaces can have when returning to the metropolis – aware of the oppressiveness of the ceaseless crowding and the way “the new buildings, ‘the needles,’ the cab driver called them, rose like knives slicing off more light, and more, to create caverns of shadow that grayed and deadened the grid of broad avenues and narrower side streets.” As Henry grows progressively frail, the space in his apartment that he and Kate occupy becomes progressively more conscribed, yet she finds her imagination has room to expand. “The poems she had been carrying in her head as she bent to the myriad tasks of her life – to her husband’s and children’s and animals’ needs – all those poems were surfacing and were there, in the very air around her, to be had for the taking.” “Tightrope” rings very true in the way it captures how life can seem suspended as one waits for a loved one to pass, and all the potential that time holds for connection and self-understanding.

In “Without Wendy,” Silman perfectly captures to the at-loose-ends feelings of a divorced man in middle age. Her protagonist is Bernie, a talented but financially hapless high-end toymaker, who obsesses about his ex-wife, Wendy. She depicts the unintentional, yet piercing, slights endured by, shall we say, the less popular member of a former couple after a marriage ends – like when Bernie’s friends invite him to their long-running New Year’s Eve party, but only after mentioning that they had first invited his ex-wife, but that she couldn’t make it. “If only Bernie could get angry, first at Wendy, and then at all the rest of them. But it takes energy to get angry, energy he doesn’t have.” He pines for Wendy, but his memories mostly remind him over again that Wendy really wasn’t very kind to him. (For example, when she visited him after he moved into a new artist’s studio, “Wendy said, with a chuckle, that it held the faint smell of success. In a tone that was not wholly flattering.” I think the way Silman breaks up one idea into those two sentences demonstrates the subtlety of her prose, as well as her emotional acuity.) By the end, we see what Bernie really pines for is the structure and momentum that marriage, even to the wrong person, can provide – as well as the pitfalls facing a divorced man who focuses too narrowly on just one star in the constellation of loneliness and defeat created by the ending of a failed marriage.

My favorite story, though is “Requiem for a Checker,” one of several stories in Heart-work about the lives of an upscale family of four. Set in the Berkshires, it’s about the relationship the family develops with the eccentric local yokel Jim, who is scraggly, opinionated, omnipresent, but ultimately indispensable – he knows things about stuff, how things operate, and about the ways of country living that the citified family could in no way figure out on their own. My guess is that each one of us who has moved to the Berkshires from the city have a character like that in their lives, someone who can be a huge pain in the tuchis but who is comes to the rescue when you need him. Which is often.

The stories also feature Jewish characters, and while they are mostly very assimilated, their ethnic identity and memories provide them with a certain steel and perspective. They are perhaps a generation or two removed from their European roots, but the memory of the hard work it took to give them the good American lives they are living informs their world view. Silman did not have to give them Jewish identities for the stories to work, but it’s also clear that they would not work as they do without that touchpoint for her characters.

The stories collected in Heart-work are of a style that most literary magazine no longer publish very often, and it was nice to see that one of Silman’s tales, “Mooning After Rembrandt,” was recognized by the online Narrative Magazine as a finalist in its 2015 fiction contest. In this book, Silman shows how that type of storytelling can still carry emotional impact and the collection is a very worthy addition to her body of work.