If you can't read [a:Joan Silber|93485|Joan Silber|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1371659931p2/93485.jpg]'s [b:Secrets of Happiness|54338144|Secrets of Happiness|Joan Silber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1599340636l/54338144.SY75.jpg|84793244] in a day, two days at the most, you're a slow-witted person with a poor attention span. It took me five days.
 It zips along. Some books do that because the author has a talent for writing in a way that it's easily taken in, but those books aren't always interesting, memorable or good. Secrets of Happiness is.
 Reading reviews of it, which I only do after I've read a book, it seemed to me that the critics weren't getting the main idea of it. I was wrong. They are. But it's not that I wasn't; it's that the book, a series of narratives by a variety of people all connected though one family—though that's not the only connection they have to others in their lives—it's hard to single one of them out. Yes, if you had to choose one person as an anchor to everyone else it'd be Ethan, whose narrative brackets everything else, but Silber portrays everyone else in it so well that they are as substantial as Ethan. It's like if you and a friend met the same person and later were talking about them and your friend commented on one characteristic and you another and even though both characteristics were equally significant when describing that person you both feel that the other didn't perceive the person the same way even though you pretty much did.
 Each chapter is a first-person narrative by one person and the stories they tell can stand alone; much of Secrets of Happiness was published that way in different publications. Yet they all combine. I did a dumb thing even for me, which was not to push on and read the last chapter instead of putting the book away and saving it for the next day. It had gathered a momentum and doing that severed a thread that lost some of it. This would be a good choice for a book to read twice.

 My father, who meant well about some things and not about others, died at seventy, not that old. He'd been living in our house in New Jersey, with caretakers around him, and in the front window was a bumper sticker that said, Get US Out! of the United Nations. He'd once been a member of the very-far-right John Birch Society and maybe always was (we didn't keep in close touch). In our years together, when the Cold War was still on, my father took pride in never being duped by the insidious plots of those trying to turn the U.S. into a socialist hell, a pride that rode on urgency. Every day he woke up to important work. The sticker in the window did not look that old, actually.