Improvement

Reyna is a tattooed white single mother in Harlem with a four year old son, Oliver, and a boyfriend, Boyd, who is serving three months on Rikers Island for selling marijuana. She visits him faithfully and their bond deepens, and when he gets out he draws her into a scheme with his friends: driving cheap cigarettes up from Virginia to sell untaxed in New York, a run that would breach his probation if it went wrong. Reyna, thinking of her child, pulls out of a trip at the last moment. Her absence sets off a chain of consequences, a wreck on the road among them, that reaches people she will never meet.

That is the spine of Joan Silber's novel, and around it she builds what the NBCC citation, written by fiction chair Tom Beer, called "a tightly woven collection of linked stories," eight chapters in three parts that move between the 1970s and 2012. Reyna's aunt Kiki, who lives in the East Village, once married a Turkish rug seller turned farmer and spent years in Turkey; her chapters bring in three German tourists who smuggle antiquities and a rug that travels down the decades. A truck driver survives a crash and takes stock of his brushes with death. Other chapters go to Richmond, Virginia, and to Berlin. Every character is trying, in the title's plain word, to improve their lot, and Silber is interested in what chance does to those plans.

At 227 pages of text it is short, and the prose, as Beer put it, is "colloquial and knowing and seemingly effortless." Kirkus called it a "winner," praising "the bumpy weave of its unpredictable story" and "sharply turned yet refreshingly unmannered prose." Publishers Weekly was cooler, finding some subplots too thin to make a fully cohesive ensemble. Readers who like the linked story form of Elizabeth Strout, or of Alice Munro, to whom the Washington Post compared Silber, will feel at home; those who want one plot followed to its end should know the book keeps changing hands.