Ideas of Heaven

I recently read a lovely collection of short stories by Joan Silber called Ideas of Heaven. The book is subtitled “A Ring of Stories” because the stories are connected one to the next, and they come full circle in the end – someone mentioned in passing in one story reappears as the protagonist/narrator in the next until the last story is tied back to the first.

The stories are also linked by a running theme: faith, love and sex. Silber explores the ways in which sex, love and religion are “always fighting over the same ground – with their sweeping claims, their promises of transport” and how each tends to fill in where the others fail. Her stories revolve around longing – religious and/or sexual. A “sacred thirst,” one character calls it. “Forms of devotion, forms of consolation.”

Silber successfully pulls off the “ring” device by making the connections subtle yet clear, without being obvious or seeming overwrought. What makes the ring even more impressive is that each story occurs in vastly different places and times – they take place in modern-day America and France, in Renaissance Italy, in China around 1900.

In fact, one of the things I most enjoyed about Silber is her dexterity – her ability to write convincingly about each of these disparate times and places and to assume, credibly, the voices of the dissimilar characters who inhabit those times and places. A gay man in New York, a turn-of-the-century Christian missionary in China, an Italian courtesan – she gives each of these a distinct, genuine voice.

Something else unusual about these stories is their epic sweep. Often short-story writers will focus on illuminating one small-yet-significant moment or one telling incident. Silber’s stories capture years, decades, lifetimes, without seeming fractured or incomplete. She distills complex characters and their equally complex lives into a few remarkable pages.

I very much enjoyed Silber’s clear, illuminating way with words, and the thoughtful, introspective tone with which she handles some fairly intense subject matter. Her stories are passionate and compassionate, elegant and wise, and they remind us that solace is sometimes found where and when we least expect it.