Household Words by Joan Silber

Originally published in Time Out New York, December 1, 2005

Hoping to capitalize on the success of Joan Silber’s story collection Ideas of Heaven, which was nominated for a National Book Award last year, W.W. Norton is reissuing the author’s long-out-of-print 1980 debut novel, Household Words. This should have been good news for her newer generation of fans, but Household Words finds Silber still stretching to hit her stride: The novel fails to evoke compassion for its impenetrable heroine, and the languid pace at which the story unfolds seems unjustified in light of its whimper of a conclusion.

Rhoda Taber, a 1940s New Jersey wife and schoolteacher, is perfectly content leading a quiet, predictable life until her husband dies unexpectedly, leaving her to raise their two young daughters on her own. Though Rhoda initially displays remarkable resilience, her husband’s death turns out to be only the first tragedy in a relentless pile-up of estrangements, illnesses and hardships.

With each frustration, each fizzled romance, Rhoda becomes filled with the sense that fate is playing a cruel joke on her, but this bemused response to her bad luck is oddly flat and tends to preclude any attempt to grapple with the specific tragedies themselves. Moreover, Silber’s third-person narrator doesn’t flesh out Rhoda’s character enough for readers to grasp her actions—or, in most cases, her lack of action. The development of the secondary characters might have added more layers to the story, but since Rhoda keeps her family and friends at a distance, they remain as inconsequential to us as they do to the heroine. Whether Rhoda is meant to symbolize something larger or is just an unfortunate woman whose life is derailed by unforeseen circumstances is left unclear. Household Words may leave readers feeling grateful for their own situations, but most will be disappointed that Silber, clearly a gifted storyteller, chose to withhold the cathartic release that might have made an otherwise depressing novel worth reading.