The Year of Silence - Hardcover

Bell, Madison Smartt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0899194907 ISBN 13: 9780899194905

Publisher: Ticknor & Fields, 1987

Synopsis

The death of Marian, a modestly successful illustrator in Manhattan, touches the lives of many people in surprising ways

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Following Straight Cut and Zero db and Other Stories, this is Bell's fifth book and fourth novel. While the chapters here do not unfold in a linear progression, and most could stand as short stories on their own, they are bound by a narrative connection that goes deeper than the chapters' common location, Manhattan, and the often overlapping characters. In the first chapter we meet a young concert pianist who practices on a painted wood keyboard and rents a closet-size room in the apartment of an old college friend, a teacher named Weber whose girlfriend, Marian, died one year before. In a following chapter a computer jock fights with his girlfriend and meets the gaze of a young woman in a bar; in another, Weber, who is also a karate expert, agonizes when Marian has an abortion. Midpoint through the volume, readers are given Marian's sad, last druggie days. In other chapters, she is seen through the eyes of a panhandling dwarf in her Upper West Side neighborhood, is glanced at by two jaded neighbor cops and, in the end, at a time coinciding with the first chapter, is recollected by a childhood friend. Like the bridge Weber climbs in the first chapter, this novel's structure combines delicacy and great tensile strength. Bell's voice is increasingly diverse, accurate and, in this book of mourning, powerfully moving.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

At novel's open, martial arts expert Weberclearly distraught over the apparent suicide of the girlfriend who dumped himis rescued from the upper reaches of the Brooklyn Bridge by his roommate Larkin. What follows is the story of girlfriend Marian's disaffection and death, told mainly through the stories of others: Weber; his sparring partner, Sinclair; devoted Gwen and "hanger-on" Crystal; the panhandling dwarf Marian befriended; the police; even Larkin's missing brother. Each voice is distinctive, its purpose clear, so the repeated shift in viewpoint does not disconcert. Though we don't learn why Marian diedundoubtedly the pointthis is a deft, unsentimental look at the demimonde. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ticknor & Fields
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0899194907
• ISBN 13: 9780899194905
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 194