Songs Without Words / by Ann Packer

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California-born author Ann Packer grew up the daughter of Stanford professors and evidence of her academic background is largely visible in her writings. Her book The Dive From Clausen's Pier received loads of popular acclaim and was recently made into a Lifetime movie. Songs Without Words highlights four major characters, each a victim of their own doubts, insecurities and perceived self-inadequacies within their ordinary domestic lives.

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Sarabeth and Liz have been close for a long time, practically sisters ever since Sarabeth's mother committed suicide after which Liz's family largely assumed care of Sarabeth on a semi-permanent basis. Now adults, the pair have their separate lives but remain on intimate terms, closely intertwined with each's families and familiar with the various problems, concerns, feelings and secrets common to middle age. Liz is the consummate housewife, married to Brody, "a keeper", who's not only a well-established corporate trendsetter, but a caring father for the couple's two teenagers--Lauren (16) and Joe (14)--and a constructive type with time for about-the-house hobbies and keeping in shape. Eccentric, soulful and free-spirited, Sarabeth's life is a bit different. A freelance artist and entrepeneur, she finds herself frequently dissatisfied with life--two failed marriages and multiple careers--and eager for experience. Her alternative means of fulfillment, more often than not, take shape in the form of various loose relationships and affairs, the latest of which has torn apart her emotional well-being.

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Liz's daughter Lauren is having the hardest time though. Sinking in a sea of anguish, depression and self-hatred, her loose attempts at numbing the pain--withdrawn isolation, pills, self-mutilation, etc.--culminate in a near-fatal accident, one which not only lands her in the mental ward of the hospital but brings the entire family, Sarabeth included, into confrontation with some deeply disturbing internal issues. Unable to grasp why Lauren, their well-rounded, A-student model child, could be so wretched, Liz and Brody find their own once-solid relationship with each other unraveling. Meanwhile Sarabeth, who may be the one person able to identify with Lauren's situation, continues her own downward spiral, removing herself from Liz and Brody's company and plunging further into her own pit of despair.

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Author and literary critic John Barth may have been on to something in his assessment of Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar, and other somber-toned, self-evaluative books of a simlar vein, when he gave it the label of "secular news reports". It's an accurate enough description for this type of contemporary womens fiction which exhaustively investigates the feelings, reflections, doubts, fears, memories, regrets and convictions of the relavent, predominately female characters. This book is like that, though not in a necessarily negative capacity. Packer's Songs Without Words achieves what so many other authors and wannabe authors try but fail at--realize the self-conscious as well-articulated prose.