“Robin Page balances the quiet exterior with her characters’ public selves and the quiet, intense rage that burns alongside the trauma that they carry. For this, the novel’s title and the pages that follow are a promise fulfilled. Page announces her debut as a confident voice with much depth both within her lines and in the pockets of space between them, breathing life into her protagonists and … protagonists and delivering on what may inspire many discussions on the places and people we hide to when we want to forget.” — Morgan Jerkins, New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing
A lyrical, haunting debut that explores the power of parenthood, identity, lust, and the legacy of trauma, as the lives of two neighbors are upended by ghosts from their past lives.
When the news of her mother’s death reaches Jocelyn Morrow, it stirs up memories of her traumatic childhood. She is a mother herself now, to six-year-old Lucy; living a life of privilege in Southern California with her husband Conrad; moving in a world of wealthy white women, even though she is not white; as far away from her past as she can get. Her designer clothes cover a net of scars across her back, and she hides an even deeper mark—a fundamental stain, something she believes invited her abuse. She also has a blossoming secret: she is becoming obsessed with Kate, her tennis coach.
Her neighbor Simon Bonaventure is a successful landscape architect and a Rwandan refugee. He too is haunted, by the wife and daughter who were taken from him in the genocide twenty years ago. The ghosts of those he could not save, and those who took them, are never far, and now he has received a letter—allegedly from his daughter, grown, and full of questions for a father she doesn’t know.
As Jocelyn and Simon begin a tentative friendship, they forge a bond out of their dark secret histories—a bond that may be their only hope of being pulled back from the abyss.
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I should preface this review by saying that I like books about broken people. Not because there’s something enjoyable about reading those stories, but because I take to heart that old adage that you never know what another person is going through, and I take it even further … you never know what a person may have overcome. Through the best fiction, I don’t just want to feel, I want to find greater understanding of people who interact with the world in ways that, from my own experience I might find confounding, exasperating, or even angering. ‘Small Silent Things’ delivered on that for me, in every respect.
From the opening page of this book, you know that Jocelyn, one of the main protagonists has both gone through and overcome a lot. She is living a privileged life in a luxurious condo by the ocean with her handsome husband and beautiful daughter, and learns that her mother has died. Though Jocelyn’s reaction is a strong one, it is not what you might expect: she is pleased, and relieved. Her mother’s death is something she has long wished for. But ‘pleased’ isn’t quite right. Because the death of a parent, even one who was abusive and at times even sadistic can have an unraveling effect. And unravel, Jocelyn does.
Meanwhile, just down the hall there is Simon who has overcome horrors of his own as a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Like Joceyln, Simon’s suffering is silent, but not small. Simon occasionally hallucinates, sometimes suffers from panic attacks and is clearly–though high-functioning and incredibly successful–also in the throes of significant PTSD. In Simon’s case, this time in contrast to Jocelyn’s, something that should be happy news threatens to exacerbate his unrest because for him, to hope is painful.
Through a variety of circumstances, Jocelyn and Simon forge a friendship, seeing in each other a kindred broken spirit. Jocelyn, who has ample reason to see men as hostile and ever-present threats, for some reason does not feel this way with Simon. Apart from her husband, with whom she shares a complicated but genuine love, Simon is the only man who feels safe, and soon they begin to confide in each other, and deepen their kinship.
Jocelyn, in the meantime, is engaging in a risky and self-destructive affair that threatens the fragile mental peace she has, and that, if discovered could topple the (at least outwardly) solid home life she has painstakingly built with her husband and child. Surrounded by women who don’t look like her, aided by a therapist who doesn’t understand her, and married to a husband concerned with containing evidence of her dysfunction, Jocelyn begins to come apart. Simon, too, is at risk of coming undone unless he and she can find solid parts in each other, anchors to hold on to, that they cannot find within themselves.
This author skillfully, in my view, gave us just enough glimpses of Jocelyn’s and Simon’s horrific histories to make us understand why they couldn’t just “get past it” but not so much that we can begin to critique and dissect it, and apply our own judgment about whether their experiences should have damaged them quite as much as they did. We see Jocelyn hold on to something she thinks will save her, but which could be her destruction, and we see Simon reach out to connect with his emotions once again, and begin to dare to hope that it just might be safe to do so.
I LOVED this book. It is one of my top five of 2019 so far both in style (sparse, matter-of-fact, but emotionally vivid) and content (how the exteriors of people are sometimes the most deceptive indicator of all when trying to see who they are). But as a caveat: it is dark stuff at times, and if liking the choices characters make is important to you for enjoyment of a novel, this might be one to pass by. For me, it was near perfection precisely because I absolutely hated some of those choices, and yet fully understood them both intellectually and emotionally. I look forward to reading more of Robin Page’s work. This debut is a gem.
So many small silent things in Jocelyn Morrow’s life “have refused to end, refused to go away.” Affluence softens every aspect of her current life, but she is also surrounded by a kind of unforgiving righteousness that spawns in this bounty. At the center of this devastating novel is an affair, for Jocelyn “a luxurious lack of memory,” and then finally a friendship with a Rwandan refugee, someone who understands the long teeth of trauma. James Baldwin wrote that art was “to help one bear the fact that all safety is an illusion”… Here is art, the fact of it. Small Silent Things is a magnificent debut.
Robin Page balances the quiet exterior with her characters’ public selves and the quiet, intense rage that burns alongside the trauma that they carry. For this, the novel’s title and the pages that follow are a promise fulfilled. Page announces her debut as a confident voice with much depth both within her lines and in the pockets of space between them, breathing life into her protagonists and delivering on what may inspire many discussions on the places and people we hide to when we want to forget.