Improvement: A Novel

by Joan Silber Narrated by Cassandra Campbell, Adenrele Ojo, Hillary Huber, R. C. Bray, Ramiz Monsef, Kate Reading

Overview

Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn't perfect, yet she sees him through a three-month stint at Riker's Island, their bond growing tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a youth that took her to Turkey and other far-off places-and loves-around the world, admires her niece's spirit but worries that motherhood to four-year-old Oliver might complicate a difficult situation. Little does she know that Boyd is pulling Reyna into a smuggling scheme, across state lines, violating his probation. When Reyna takes a step back, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them.

A novel that examines conviction, connection, repayment, and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki's beloved Turkish rugs, as colorful as the tattoos decorating Reyna's body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

09/25/2017
In her far-ranging latest, Silber (Fools) delivers a whirlwind narrative reminiscent of her compact story collections in novel form, with mixed results. Told in three parts and jumping back and forth from the 1970s to 2012, the multipronged story drops in on the lives of loosely connected individuals, all trying (and mostly failing) to improve their lot in some way. Reyna, a white single mother living in Harlem, is torn between staying loyal to her African-American boyfriend Boyd (after his three-month sentence at Rikers Island for selling weed) and getting more deeply involved in the interstate cigarette smuggling scheme Boyd hatched with his cousin and pals. When she pulls out of a smuggling run at the last minute, her decision sets off a chain reaction with dire consequences for one of Boyd’s friends, his love interest left stranded in another state, and a truck driver. Add to that the backstory of Reyna’s great-aunt Kiki’s marriage to a Turkish rug seller turned farmer, the tangential stories of three German antiquities smugglers who stop by Kiki’s farm for a night and leave a lasting impression, and a jump forward 30 years to find one of the German smugglers in the hospital dying of heart disease. With so many characters, it’s a lot of ground to cover in little space, and some of the subplots lack the depth needed to make this a fully cohesive ensemble novel. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

Praise for Improvement

Winner of the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

Author is the Recipient of the 2018 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
A New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Selection
A Newsday Best Book of 2017
A Kirkus Best Book of 2017
1 of 6 New Paperbacks You Should Read in August 2018 (Vulture)
1 of 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2017 (The Washington Post)
1 of 10 Top Fiction Titles of 2017 (Wall Street Journal)

"Without fuss or flourishes, Joan Silber weaves a remarkably patterned tapestry connecting strangers from around the world to a central tragic car accident. The writing here is funny and down-to-earth, the characters are recognizably fallible, and the message is quietly profound: We are not ever really alone, however lonely we feel." —The Wall Street Journal, 1 of 10 top fiction titles of 2017

"Some books make evangelists of critics, and Silber’s eighth book is one of them. Written with minimalist mastery and maximum feeling, the novel circles a number of characters linked—sometimes closely, sometimes not—to Reyna, a tattooed single mom in New York. What do we want out of life? How do we hold on to love? How do we get over it? Silber, a writer’s writer who deserves a wider audience, explores big questions with subtlety, humor, and compassion. 'Improvement is an everyday masterpiece,' writes reviewer Tom Beer." —Newsday, Best Books of 2017

"With consummate skill, Silber reveals surprising connections between characters in contemporary New York and 1970s Turkey." —The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

"Both the plot and the prose maintain an absorbing momentum." —The New Yorker

"[I]t feels vital to love Silber’s work, which has been too little loved, too little mentioned, beyond a small readership that seems to be composed mostly of other writers. Silber is 72, and with Improvement has written at least three truly great books. Now is the moment to appreciate that she is here, in our midst: our country’s own Alice Munro. Silber’s great theme as a writer is the way in which humans are separated from their intentions, by desires, ideas, time... Like Grace Paley and Lucia Berlin, she’s a master of talking a story past its easiest meaning; like Munro, a master of the compression and dilation of time, what time and nothing else can reveal to people about themselves. She has an American voice: silvery, within arm’s length of old cadences, but also limber, thieving, marked by occasional raids on slang and jargon, at ease both high and low, funny, tenderhearted, sharp. It gives her the rare ability to reach the deepest places in the plainest ways." —Washington Post

"This is a novel of richness and wisdom and huge pleasure. Silber knows, and reveals, how close we live to the abyss, but she also revels in joy, particularly the joy that comes from intimate relationships . . . [A] perfectly balanced mix of celebration and wryness." —The New York Times Book Review

"The gorgeous though damaged Turkish rug that adorns the dust jacket of Joan Silber’s Improvement is a fitting symbol for this exceptional novel, and not just because one of its subplots concerns carpet dealing. Ms. Silber is a weaver of disparate lives . . . With Improvement she has created her most vibrant tapestry of what she wryly calls 'the ever-expanding joke of human trouble' . . . Improvement is forthright and funny about the blinkered muddle humankind makes for itself. Yet its vibrating web of interconnection is hopeful and beautiful." —The Wall Street Journal

"There's always room for Joan Silber's Improvement." —Vanity Fair

"You can feel, in those words, how tenderly Silber treats her large cast of men and women, how she deals out small moments of grace even as things go terribly wrong for them. This seems like a good place to bring up Silber’s voice: unshowy and intimate, precise and colloquial, she seems almost to be confiding the novel to us, a worldly wise aunt not unlike Kiki herself. She marshals great feeling in the course of Improvement without making it seem a big deal . . . An everyday masterpiece." —Newsday

"If your must-read this month is a love-and-loss story seasoned with single motherhood and smuggling schemes, National Book Award finalist Joan Silber's Improvement hits the sexy sweet spot from page one." —Elle Magazine

"My revelation of the year was the writing of Joan Silber . . . I was immediately captivated by her fictional method, a cross between the novel and linked stories, in which a minor character in one chapter will become a major figure in another. This connect-the-dots narrative structure makes possible wide leaps over time and space, while still offering that sense of connection and emotional depth that makes the best fiction so satisfying." —Ruth Franklin, Favorite Books of 2017, The Paris Review

"Joan Silber’s quietly brilliant novel Improvement weaves an intricate, zigzagging pattern out of the lives of a dozen people, and six well-chosen narrators provide the voices . . . The multiplicity of voices in this production gives a wonderful aural dimension to the weave of inadvertently interlocked lives." —The Washington Post, Best New Audio Books of December

"Her work generates tension and momentum from the ebbs and flows of individual lives, but also from the unexpected and sometimes unexplained links between them . . . Like the Turkish carpet that drives much of the book’s action, Improvement repeats shapes and motifs, layering them in an intricate pattern that builds into something far more complex than the sum of its parts . . . Her technique of shifting viewpoints from one chapter to the next highlights not only the way a single dramatic event can ripple outward into ever-expanding circles, but also how a moment that is incidental for one person can be decisive for another . . . Part of Silber’s gift is knowing which stories not to tell. Her prose is spare, devoid of flourishes and extraneous information . . . It is both tragic and infuriating that a writer [like Joan] as innovative, humane, and wise is not read more widely." —Ruth Franklin, The New York Review of Books

"The much celebrated Silber creates yet another artfully structured new novel, in which stories of a multitude of characters ricochet in cunning ways, crossing generations and continents . . . [An] intriguing contemporary chronicle." —BBC Culture, 1 of the 10 Best Books of 2017

"Improvement is a tapestry of interweaving narratives tied together by two unconventional women—an aunt and her niece who defy family expectations . . . That Silber is a writer’s writer just means that her diverse cast of characters never feel anything but authentic, and her prose is both precise on the sentence level and masterly in structure." —Vulture, 1 of 6 New Paperbacks You Should Read in August

"This gorgeously written novel, funny and full of heart, follows several characters in the life of Reyna, a tattooed single mom with a rambunctious son, a boyfriend in Rikers, and a wise aunt who has seen it all. Each chapter tells a story. I loved every one of them." —The Seattle Times, Mary Ann Gwinn’s favorite books of 2017

"Silber's concise and lyrical writing is at its best in her latest novel, Improvement." —Washington Life

"The prose serenely glides over irreversible, defining moments and how differently characters deal with the curveballs life throws at them . . . Improvement is a meditation on the space of time and distance and certain defining events change people and propel them to re-calibrate their priorities in life . . . The prose eloquently evinces human emotions—love and heartbreak, regret and loss, guilt and redemption . . . Improvement reads like fragmented character studies of a disparate group of people, intricately woven together by chance and fate. Exquisitely woven, this is a rich tapestry of human conditions." —Chicago Review of Books

"The centrifugal momentum of Silber’s tales pushes Improvement away from conventional resolutions, thus avoiding the tidy endings of tragedy and comedy. While these characters enjoy no generic happy ending (a contrivance that would feel false in a novel of such finely observed realism), neither are they crushed beneath the wheel of an annihilating Fortune. They make difficult decisions and learn to live with the consequences, joy and bitterness mixed equally. Ultimate success may be unreachable and undefinable, but with honest self-assessment and maybe a little luck, improvement remains possible." —Chapter16.org

"Silber’s extraordinary new novel, with a single mother and her eccentric aunt at its center, is kaleidoscopic as it spans decades and stretches from New York to Berlin and Turkey. Her wildly different characters intersect, and as she subtly details the quotidian stuff of life, she raises questions about fate and chance, power and redemption, and, finally, the universal need for connection." —The National Book Review

"A novel featuring cigarette smuggling, single parenting, prison, and rug collectors, the beginning of which was published in Tin House and appears in Best American Short Stories. In a starred review, Kirkus says 'There is something so refreshing and genuine about this book.'" —The Millions

"We love a good butterfly effect scenario, and Improvement delivers tenfold." —HelloGiggles

"It's absolutely wonderful . . . She's an amazing writer . . . She manages to really understand the complicated relationships between people and how people connect and disconnect and how true love is something you carry with you all your life and how that changes over time. It's a beautiful book and I can't recommend Joan Silber enough." —James Conrad, The Golden Notebook (Woodstock, NY) on Book Picks, WAMC

"There is something so refreshing and genuine about this book, coming partly from the bumpy weave of its unpredictable story and partly from its sharply turned yet refreshingly unmannered prose. A winner." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Silber uses beautiful declarative sentences to paint a whole mural of a story, and how she does it is entertaining and very sweet. This is a morally decent novel, and God knows we need more of those right now." —Lisa Peet, Library Journal, What We're Reading Now

"Silber weaves together character studies that examine love, money (and how to get it,) and the ripple effects of choices made. Silber’s decision to write events of great magnitude from everyday points of view lends realism and universality to her story. Fans of character-driven, literary fiction should be on the lookout for Improvement." —Booklist

"The subtle ripple effects of individual choices and actions are eloquently portrayed through Silber's penetrating eye in this elegant and thought-provoking novel." —Library Journal

"I love all of Joan Silber's work for her mastery of character, her ferocious and searching compassion, and her elegant lines that make the mind hum for hours. Improvement is so crisp and resonant a novel that it made me forget the chaos of life around me; a feat for which I'm truly grateful." —Lauren Groff, author of Florida and Fates and Furies

"Joan Silber is America’s own Alice Munro. The psychological acuity, the ambition, the breadth of time and space: it’s all there in Improvement, which demonstrates with great poignancy how our small decisions ramify out and touch the lives of people we don’t even know. This book is deep and true and riveting." —Joshua Henkin, author of The World Without You

"In Improvement, Joan Silber’s skillful new novel, characters suffer from failed romances, moves to distant shores, and death, yet somehow, they manage to find each other in the end, and reconnect in deeply meaningful and satisfying ways. Silber is not only a gorgeous and masterful writer, she is also a wise and knowing one." —Lily Tuck, author of The Double Life of Liliane

"More than any writer I know, Joan Silber's fiction makes sense of the randomness of our connections while honoring the essential mystery that drives our desires. Her sentences are so finely tuned that they miraculously convey her characters’ everyday foibles and ecstatic recognitions at the very same time. Improvement is a searching and profound novel by one of our masters." —Marisa Silver, author of Little Nothing and Mary Coin

"Subtle, sexy, brilliant in its unexpected connections and soulful generosity, this is an intensely satisfying novel." —Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and Archangel

"A new book by Joan Silber is a grand event in American literature. Silber has been creating a unique body of work that, in its immense authority and vision, puts her in the company of Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant. Improvement is a novel that explores love and ambition and the way it entangles, wounds, transforms vibrant characters across New York City, Virginia, Turkey, and Germany. This is a magnificent work about the complexity of human connection, full of remarkable insight and compassion." —Karen E. Bender, author of Refund, a finalist for the National Book Award

Praise for Joan Silber

"No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power." —Boston Globe

"Joan Silber is a master of the short story. She has a rare gift for capturing the complexity—and beauty—of quotidian moments. Her stories span an astonishing range of countries, characters, and centuries, as she writes with equal ease and insight of sixteenth century Venice, China during the Boxer rebellion, and contemporary New York City. In perfectly crafted prose, she shows how small decisions and chance encounters ripple, in ever widening circles, through a person’s life and the lives of others they know, love or have never met." —Deborah Tannen, chair of the PEN/Malamud selection committee






Praise for Fools

"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." —Dan Chaon

"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." —Stacey D'Erasmo

"Joan Silber's stories are like compressed novels. They are interlocking tales that fill in the history of revolutionary politics in the twentieth century. If you want to understand progressive intellectuals in America, read this book. It's always absorbing--the characters and the intensely condensed narrative details." —Edmund White

"Joan Silber writes with wisdom, humor, grace, and wry intelligence. Her characters bear welcome news of how we will survive." ―Andrea Barrett

"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." —Susan Straight

"Joan Silber's stories charm us. And amuse us. And engage us. And move us. And even enlighten us. Fools embraces us all." —Amy Bloom

"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." —Jim Shepard

"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." —Antonya Nelson

"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." —Christine Schutt

"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." —Lily Tuck



Praise for The Size of the World

"Silber allows readers to see life as intimately knowable yet essentially mysterious." —Washington Post

"In Silber's magnificent fiction . . . the characters' lifetimes pass with a page-turning effortlessness that belies their intense, moving depths." —Publishers Weekly Starred Review



Praise for Lucky Us

"Deft writing and deep affection for her characters. A timely and wonderful tale." —Booklist

"This was such a good story that I missed it when I finished reading. Recommended for all fiction collections." —Library Journal

"[A] tender tale...delivered with clear-eyed candor and not a whit of sentimentality." —Publishers Weekly

"Joan Silber has written a novel both contemporary and timeless about love, its unexpected possibilities and limitations, and about the role of fate in all our lives. Her richly imagined characters and lovely prose make every page of this book a pleasure." —Margot Livesey, author of Criminals

"Lucky Us is a beautiful novel. Elisa and Gabe's story is charged with desperation, tenderness, and compassion. It's a love story of our time, peopled with lively characters and packed with marvelous details." —HA JIN, author of Waiting

Praise for In My Other Life

"These elegant and wise stories pay tribute to ordinary urban heroes." —Carmela Ciuraru, New York Times Book Review

"She offers an archaeology of feeling layered with pure, vivid insight." —Ruminator Review

Library Journal

11/01/2017
As with her previous book, Fools, Silber's new novel is a collection of interconnected stories, in which the connections are not always initially apparent. The work opens from the perspective of Reyna, a young single mother in New York City whose African American boyfriend is doing time at Rikers. The narrative then passes to her Aunt Kiki, now a seemingly staid older woman living alone in the East Village, and recounts her youthful adventurous in Turkey, where she abandoned her middle-class Jewish existence to marry a Turkish rug salesman in Istanbul and later moved to his family's remote farm in rural Cappadocia. Later chapters move to members of Reyna's circle, those affected when her newly released boyfriend's Virginia-to-New York cigarette smuggling scheme goes awry, the German antiquities smugglers that Aunt Kiki meets in Turkey in the 1970s, and the adult daughter of two of the Germans in the present day. VERDICT The subtle ripple effects of individual choices and actions are eloquently portrayed through Silber's penetrating eye in this elegant and thought-provoking novel.—Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169837780
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	11/14/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

Everyone knows this can happen. People travel and they find places they like so much they think they've risen to their best selves just by being there. They feel distant from everyone at home who can't begin to understand. They take up with beautiful locals of the opposite sex, they settle in, they get used to how everything works, they make homes. But maybe not forever.

I had an aunt who was such a person. She went to Istanbul when she was in her twenties. She met a good-looking carpet seller from Cappadocia. She'd been a classics major in college and had many questions to ask him, many observations to offer. He was a gentle and intelligent man who spent his days talking to travelers. He'd come to think he no longer knew what to say to Turkish girls, and he loved my aunt's airy conversation. When her girlfriends went back to Greece, she stayed behind and moved in with him. This was in 1970.

His shop was in Sultanahmet, where tourists went, and he lived in Fener, an old and jumbled neighborhood. Kiki, my aunt, liked having people over, and their apartment was always filled with men from her husband's region and expats of various ages. She was happy to cook big semi-Turkish meals and make up the couch for anyone passing through. She helped out in the store, explained carpet motifs to anyone who walked in—those were stars for happiness, scorpion designs to keep real scorpions away. In her letters home, she sounded enormously pleased with herself—she dropped Turkish phrases into her sentences, reported days spent sipping çay and kahve. All this became lore in my family.

She wrote to her father, who suffered from considerable awkwardness in dealing with his children (her mother had died some six years before), and to her kid brother, who was busy hating high school. The family was Jewish, from a forward-thinking leftist strain; Kiki had gone to camps where they sang songs about children of all nations, so no one had any bigoted objections to her Turkish boyfriend. Kiki sent home to Brooklyn a carpet she said was from the Taurus Mountains. Her father said, "Very handsome colors. I see you are a connoisseur. No one is walking on it, I promise."

Then Kiki's boyfriend's business took a turn for the worse. There was a flood in the basement of his store and a bill someone never paid and a new shop nearby that was getting all the business. Or something. The store had to close. Her family thought this meant that Kiki was coming home at last. But, no. Osman, her guy, had decided to move back to the village he was from, to help his father, who raised pumpkins for their seed-oil. Also tomatoes, green squash, and eggplant. Kiki was up for the move; she wanted to see the real Turkey. Istanbul was really so Western now. Cappadocia was very ancient and she couldn't wait to see the volcanic rock. She was getting married! Her family in Brooklyn was surprised about that part. Were they invited to the wedding? Apparently not. In fact, it had already happened by the time they got the letter. "I get to wear a beaded hat and a glitzy headscarf, the whole shebang," Kiki wrote. "I still can't believe it."

Neither could any of her relatives. But they sent presents, once they had an address. A microwave oven, a Mister Coffee, an electric blanket for the cold mountains. They were a practical and liberal family, they wanted to be helpful. They didn't hear from Kiki for a while and her father worried that the gifts had been stolen in the mail. "I know it's hard for you to imagine," Kiki wrote, "but we do very well without electricity here. Every morning I make a wood fire in the stove. Very good-smelling smoke. I make a little fire at the bottom of the water heater too."

Kiki built fires? No one could imagine her as the pioneer wife. Her brother, Alan (who later became my father), asked what kind of music she listened to there and if she had a radio. She sent him cassette tapes of favorite Turkish singers—first a crappy male crooner and then a coolly plaintive woman singer who was really very good. Alan was always hoping to visit, but first he was in college and working as a house painter in the summers and then he had a real job in advertising that he couldn't leave. Kiki said not a word about making any visits home. Her father offered to pay for two tickets to New York so they could all meet her husband, but Kiki wrote, "Oh, Dad. Spend your money on better things." No one nagged her; she'd been a touchy teenager, given to sullen outbursts, and everyone was afraid of that Kiki appearing again.

She stayed for eight years. Her letters said, "My husband thinks I sew as well as his sisters," and "I'm rereading my copy of Ovid in Latin. It's not bad!" and "Winter is sooo long this year, I hate it. Osman has already taught me all he knows about the stars." No one could make sense of who she was now or put the parts together. There were no children and no pregnancies that anyone heard about, and the family avoided asking.

Her brother was finally about to get himself over for a visit, when Kiki wrote to say, "Guess what? I'm coming back at last. For good. Cannot wait to see you all."

"Cannot wait, my ass," her brother said. "She waited fine. What's so irresistible now?"

No, the husband was not coming with her. "My life here has reached its natural conclusion," Kiki wrote. "Osman will be my dear friend forever but we've come to the end of our road."

"So who ran around on who?" the relatives kept asking. "She'll never say, will she?"

Everybody wondered what she would look like when she arrived. Would she be sun-dried and weather-beaten, would she wear billowing silk trousers like a belly dancer, would the newer buildings of New York amaze her, would she gape at the Twin Towers? None of the above. She looked like the same old Kiki, thirty-one with very good skin, and she was wearing jeans and a turtleneck, possibly the same ones she'd left home with. She said, "God! Look at YOU!" when she saw her brother, grown from a scrawny teenager to a man in a sport jacket. She said, "Been a while, hasn't it?" to her dad.

Her luggage was a mess, very third-world, woven plastic valises baled up with string, and there were a lot of them. She had brought back nine carpets! What was she thinking? She wanted to sell them. To someone or other.

Her brother always remembered that when they ate their first meal together, Kiki held her knife and fork like a European. She laughed at things lightly, as if the absurdity of it all wasn't worth shrieking over. She teased Alan about his eyeglasses ("you look like a genius in them") and his large appetite ("has not changed since you were eight"). She certainly sounded like herself. Wasn't she tired from her flight? "No big deal," she said.

She'd had a crappy job in a bookstore before going off on her travels, so what was she going to do now? Did she have any friends left from before? It seemed that she did. Before very long, she moved in with someone named Marcy she'd known at Brooklyn College. Marcy's mother bought the biggest of the rugs, and Kiki used the proceeds to start renting a storefront in the East Village, where she displayed her carpets and other items she had brought back—a brass tea set and turquoise beads and cotton pants with gathered hems that she herself had once worn.

The store stayed afloat for a while. Her brother sort of wondered if she was dealing drugs—hashish was all over Istanbul in the movie Midnight Express , which came out just before her return. Kiki refused to see such a film, with its lurid scenes of mean Turkish prisons. "Who has nice prisons?" she said. "Name me one single country in the world. Just one."

When her store began to fail and she had to give it up, Kiki supported herself by cleaning houses. She evidently did this with a good spirit; the family was much more embarrassed about it than she was. "People here don't know how to clean their houses," she would say. "It's sort of remarkable, isn't it?"

By the time I was a little kid, Kiki had become the assistant director of a small agency that booked housekeepers and nannies. She was the one you got on the phone, the one who didn't take any nonsense from either clients or workers. She was friendly but strict and kept people on point.

I was only a teeny bit afraid of her as a child. She could be very withering if I was acting up and getting crazy and knocking over chairs. But when my parents took me to visit, Kiki had special cookies for me (I loved Mallomars), and for a while she had a boyfriend named Hernando who would play airplane with me and go buzzing around the room. I loved visiting her.

My father told me later that Hernando had wanted to marry Kiki. "But she wasn't made for marriage," he said. "It's not all roses, you know." He and my mother had a history of having, as they say, their differences.

"Kiki was always like a bird," my father said. "Flying here and there."

What a corny thing to say.

I grew up on the outskirts of Boston, in a neighborhood whose leafy familiarity I spurned once I was old enough for hip disdain. I moved to New York as soon as I finished high school, which I barely did. My parents and I were not on good terms in my early years in the city. They hated the guy I first took off with, and my defense of him often turned into insulting them. And I really had no use for more school, and they could never take this in. But Kiki made a point of keeping in touch. She'd call on the phone and say, "I'm thirsty, let's go have a drink. Okay?" At first I was up in Inwood, as far north in Manhattan as you can get, so it was a long subway ride to see her in the East Village, but once I moved to Harlem it wasn't quite so bad. When my son was born, four years ago, Kiki brought me the most useful layette of baby stuff, things a person couldn't even know she needed. Oliver would calm down and sleep when she walked him around. He grew up calling her Aunt Great Kiki.

The two of us lived in a housing project, one of the nicer ones, in an apartment illegally passed on to me by a boyfriend. It was a decent size, with good light, and I liked my neighbors. They were a great mix, and nobody wanted to rat on me about the lease. They'd stopped thinking I was another white gentrifier, sneaking in.

In late October of the year that the TV kept telling us to get prepared for Hurricane Sandy, Oliver had a great time flicking the flashlight on and off (a really annoying game) and watching me tape giant x 's on the window glass. All the kids on our hallway were hyped up and excited, running around and yelling. We kept looking out the windows as the sky turned a sepia tint. When the rains broke and began to come down hard, we could hear the moaning of the winds and everything clattering and banging in the night, awnings and trees getting the hell beaten out of them. I kept switching to different channels on TV so we wouldn't miss any of it. The television had better coverage than my view out the window. Through the screen a newscaster in a suit told us the Con Ed substation on Fourteenth Street had exploded! The lights in the bottom of Manhattan had gone out! I made efforts to explain to Oliver about electricity, as if I knew. Never, never put your finger in a socket. Oliver wanted to watch a better program.

At nine thirty the phone rang and it was my father, who had more patience with me these days but didn't call that often. He was calling to say, "Your aunt Kiki doesn't have power, you know. She's probably sitting in the dark." I had forgotten about her entirely. She was on East Fifth Street, in the no-electricity zone. I promised I'd check on Kiki in the morning.

"I might have to walk there," I said. "It's like a hundred twenty blocks. You're not going to ask about my neighborhood? It's fine."

"How's Oliver?"

"Great."

"Don't forget about Kiki, okay? Tell me that."

"I just told you," I said.

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