Songs Without Words [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

"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.

I was anxious to read SONGS WITHOUT WORDS since I greatly enjoyed Ann Packer's first novel THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER. "SONGS" starts well with a flashback to 1976 a time when Sarabeth and Liz, the two lead female characters, are best friends and high school students. Sarabeth is actually living with Liz's family in their Palo Alto home as her life was disrupted when her mother committed suicide and her father moved back east. We flash forward thirty years to present day Northern California and find Liz is now a typical suburban housewife with a successful husband in the high tech industry and a teenage son and daughter. Sarabeth is still single in her mid to late forties doing some free lance creative things like "staging" houses for realtors, making lampshades and we presume often living off the inheritance from her deceased parents. Sarabeth is also mourning being dumped by her latest lover who happened to be married with kids and trying to come to terms with some realities about her life. Meanwhile Liz's life is not quite as perfect as it seems as her teenage daughter Lauren is becoming increasingly depressed and will soon make a stupid choice that will disrupt her whole family as well as her mother's friendship with her oldest friend Sarabeth.

While Packer is a gifted writer and keen observer of upper middle class suburban life this book soon becomes tedious and boring. Sarabeth and Liz are well developed sympathetic characters but the pace of the book is so slow and the plot so plodding the reader soon loses interest in them. Liz's daughter Lauren and her high schoool experience are interesting but I would have liked more of a back story as to why she is so depressed. The last third of the book is so incrediably sluggish I felt like celebrating when I reached the final word.

I agree with so many other reviewers here: this was not a very good book. The idea of the story intrigued me but the two women were uninteresting and even a little annoying. But more than the women or the plot, what bothered me the most was the poor writing. The author writes paragraphs of excessive detail that don't do anything at all for the story, don't tell me about a character, don't move the story forward, nothing. More annoying than that are sentences like this: "Esther was an elderly woman Sarabeth had sort of adopted." Huh? Who is saying this? This is like some kind of authorial intrusion to explain things to the reader, because she couldn't do it within dialogue. Also the entire first paragraph of chapter three which explains the company Brody works for - I kept wanting to shout, "Show, don't tell!" - one of the very first lessons in any creative writing class.

Perhaps this book was rushed into print. Perhaps, as someone else suggested, she needed more help from an editor. I've heard that the Claussen Pier book is good and I might borrow it from the library to find out. But this one? Naw. Not a good book.

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