LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD. “Emotionally, it’s astounding. ‘Linked’ doesn’t begin to describe the complex web Silber has woven. . . . Beautiful, intricate and wise.”—New York Times Book Review
When is it wise to be a fool for something? What makes people want to be better than they are? From New York to India to Paris, from the Catholic Worker movement to Occupy Wall Street, the characters in Joan Silber’s dazzling new story cycle tackle this question head-on. Vera, the shy, anarchist daughter of missionary parents, leaves her family for love and activism in New York. A generation later, her own doubting daughter insists on the truth of being of two minds, even in marriage. The adulterous son of a Florida hotel owner steals money from his family and departs for Paris, where he takes up with a young woman and finds himself outsmarted in turn. Fools ponders the circle of winners and losers, dupers and duped, and the price we pay for our beliefs.
Fools is a luminous, intelligent, and rewarding work of fiction from the author for whom the Boston Globe said, "No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power."
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Library Journal
At the start of this novel made up of six interconnected stories, rebellious teen Vera, a child of Christian missionaries, falls in love with her third cousin, Joe. The pair move to New York's Greenwich Village, where they fall into a circle of like-minded anarchists including the then-unknown Dorothy Day. A later story is told from the perspective of their daughter, Louise, who is raised under the shadow of her father's imprisonment, a fate he chose over serving in World War II. Set in India, New York, Paris, and Florida between 1920 and the present, other tales are more far-flung, and discovering the connections among them is part of the book's allure. Every character here—the idealists, dreamers, and cynics alike—could be one of the "fools" of the title, as Silber makes clear in her loving but clear-eyed account of her characters' foibles. VERDICT This powerful and moving collection by a National Book Award finalist (Ideas of Heaven) recalls Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad in its novelistic cohesion of multiple sprawling tales.—Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY
The New York Times Book Review - Natalie Bakopoulos
…a moving collection of six linked stories—though "linked" doesn't begin to describe the complex web Silber has woven. Structurally, the intricacy is skillful; emotionally, it's astounding. One of the many pleasures here is understanding how the stories intersect and how each, despite the large swaths of time encompassed, reveals only versions of lives. The interconnectedness creates a larger narrative, so we can imagine countless other versions still unrevealed…[Fools is a] beautiful, intricate and wise collection…
Publishers Weekly
This tightly constructed collection from Silber (Ideas of Heaven) shows her talents at their finest. The stories pivot nimbly from the foibles of young anarchists in Greenwich Village in the early 20th century, in “Fools,” to a spoiled young man’s comeuppance in Paris in the early ’60s, to a nonprofit development worker’s attempt to solicit money from a potential donor in the present. In “Two Opinions,” Louise, the young married daughter of the narrator from “Fools,” stays in New York when her husband goes to Japan for work. Rather than despair at what becomes an extended separation, Louise creates her own happiness. Self-discovery many years too late is a recurring theme. In “Going Too Far,” middle-aged Gerard doesn’t realize until after 9/11 that his heart still belongs to his ex-wife, now a convert to Islam eager to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. And in “Better,” Marcus, reeling from a breakup with his boyfriend, finds possibilities for picking himself back up, in a memoir written by one of the anarchists from “Fools.” Though they make bad choices and exhibit a multitude of faults, Silber’s characters display wonderfully lifelike vulnerability and complexity. Agent: Geri Thoma, Marson Thoma. (May)
Stacey D'Erasmo
Joan Silber is one of the wisest, finest, most capacious observers of the human condition writing now. We should all be as heartbreakingly foolish and beautiful as the characters in this collection. Silber understands them inside out, and brings them close to us, as no one else can.
Edmund White
Joan Silber's stories are like compressed novels. They are interlocking tales that fill in the history of revolutionary politics in the twentieth century.
Dan Chaon
Fools is astonishing for its range,for its sweeping sense of time and place, and most especially for its deep insight into the way small choices can circle out to shape lives, and even human history.This is a beautiful book and an important literary achievement.”
Susan Straight
I loved Fools. The stories always surprised me, with the narratives unfolding as if in real time, and then turning unexpected in so many ways, twisting into stories that felt like remembered history, but with such added emotion that I thought about the characters for several days afterward as if they were here in my house.”
Amy Bloom
Joan Silber’s stories charm us. And amuse us. And engage us. And move us. And even enlighten us. Fools embraces us all.”
Jim Shepard
Fools is a wonderfully winning exploration of impetuousness in all of its appalling and appealing forms, and its deftly interconnected stories are devoted to those dreamers who act rashly out of their better natures, who never quit asking the world, Can’t you do better than that?—a question certain to become increasingly urgent as this twenty-first century progresses.”
Stacey D’Erasmo
Joan Silber is one of the wisest, finest, most capacious observers of the human condition writing now. We should all be as heartbreakingly foolish and beautiful as the characters in this collection. Silber understands them inside out, and brings them close to us, as no one else can.
Antonya Nelson
Fools is a unique and fascinating collection that celebrates not so much a place or a family or a single life as it does an idea—anarchy—as it runs through three generations of loosely connected people. The collective vision this provokes is what makes the book intellectually satisfying, the separate lives it convincingly displays are what move the heart.”
Christine Schutt
Fools is great fiction. Here are anarchists and pacifists, protesters in causes to do with freedom and equality, causes to which these self-aware men and women devote themselves—or not. It is impossible not to be enthralled.”
Lily Tuck
In Joan Silber’s dazzling new story collection, written in elegant prose and with clairvoyant wisdom, the loves and aspirations, both spiritual and material, of six very different people reaffirm in unexpected ways the fallibility and the essential sameness of our human condition.
Boston Globe
Silber deftly constructs whole, fully realized lives in just a few pages, and her use of first-person narratives gives these stories an intimate, confessional feeling, as if you’ve struck up a conversation with a particularly talkative stranger.
Wall Street Journal
Excellent . . . the pleasure of Ms. Silber’s overlapping tales is that in all of them characters do something to surprise you.
The Oprah Magazine O
So well made and pleasurable . . . [Silber]
kicks ass.
Daily Beast
Sly, graceful.
Kirkus Reviews
A sequence of six linked stories explores the lives of those who risk something for their ideals, which is not the same as, and produces quite different results from, risking something for one's beliefs. Silber (The Size of the World, 2008, etc.) teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She has won a PEN/Hemingway Award and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize and the National Book Award. The title story begins with telegraphic directness: "A lot of people thought anarchists were fools." Silber makes much of the difference between what it means to be a fool and being merely foolish. The former is so much worse. In "Fools," a merry band of political idealists lives a bohemian life in New York in the '20s. In the background looms the incarceration and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. The characters make love, marry, cheat on their spouses and scatter. The next story, "Hanging Fruit," follows Anthony--the son of one who left penury for profit, then regressed back into poverty. "Two Opinions" follows Louise, the daughter of an anarchist, in jail as a conscientious objector. The legacy of her father's radical politics costs her the life she imagines she wants, but she is merely mistaken and learns to provide for herself in novel ways, finding satisfactions she couldn't have dreamed of, including the possibility that satisfaction is overrated. "Better" is the weakest in this worthwhile collection. Its connection to the others is tenuous. "Going Too Far" dramatizes a clash between the spiritual and the practical. It and the final story, "Buying and Selling," are more completely realized. A thought-provoking collection; "Buying and Selling" is particularly strong.
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