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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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Songs
Without Words by Ann Packer |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Friendship Ann
Packer’s new novel, Songs
Without Words, presents the tension in a long term friendship that arises
following something dramatic that happened in the life of one of the
characters. The brokenness becomes uncomfortable and disturbing, while those
positive things that led to the friendship in the first place are missing.
Having loved Packer’s debut novel, The
Dive From Clausen’s Pier, I expected to relish Songs
Without Words. Instead, the characters here are less developed, and the
story became more tiresome than engaging. Nonetheless, Packer’s a fine
writer, and a subpar novel from her beats most others. Here’s an excerpt, from
the beginning of Chapter 3, pp. 28-31: Brody
worked at a company called Oiron, where he was VP of business development;
he'd been on board almost since the beginning, moving from one position to
another as the company went public and grew to its current size of five
hundred employees spread over three continents. The best-selling product was
Parapet, a comprehensive Wi-Fi security system; Oiron was the name of a
fortress in It
was Friday now, the end of a long week. Brody was in front of his terminal,
triaging the afternoon's e-mails and thinking about tonight, when he and Liz
were taking the kids to his favorite restaurant in North Beach, a tiny,
crowded place where you could almost taste the garlic from the sidewalk, and
the waiters jostled your chair as they passed behind you, and the only
difficult moment you could possibly have was choosing from among the
twenty-seven different pastas on the menu. He'd discovered it his first year
in "Dude" He
looked up and saw Mike Patterson standing in his doorway. Mike was big, maybe six feet five,
with thick shoulders and arms—high school football, Brody was pretty sure.
Mike was in marketing, where Brody himself had been for years; Brody'd been
in on the hire, in fact. Mike was a good guy. Brody and Liz had done dinner
out with him and his wife several times. "Who are you duding,
dude?" Brody said. Mike grinned as he came into
Brody's office. "My brother put his foot down when his kids started
calling their mother dude." "Joe does that,"
Brody said. " 'Mom, dude, will you make some brownies?' " "And Liz?" "Liz just laughs. You know
how she is." Mike had stopped at Brody's
bookcase and was looking at the tennis ball Brody kept on a stand there, a
wild shot off Andre Agassi's racquet during a practice session Brody'd
happened by at the U.S. Open one year. Mike said, "I'm still shocked you
stole this." " 'Kept it,' " Brody
said. "I 'kept' it." "Sure you did, pal. So are
you coming?" "Where would that
be?" Mike mimed drinking something,
and Brody looked at his watch: late on Friday afternoons the helium balloon
that was Oiron's usual corporate urgency started making its way to the floor,
and to cushion the landing there was generally a beer bash in the cafeteria. "Whoa,"
he said, "it's later than I thought." "Brody, it's not about
time," Mike said, "it's about the change in synergy. I'm surprised
you didn't notice." "Up yours." "HR's going to have to
schedule another sensitivity-training retreat for us if you don't shape
up." Brody rolled his eyes.
"Promise you'll shoot me if that happens." "I would, but I've already
got someone lined up to shoot me." Downstairs,
there were already several dozen people gathered, talking mostly in their
work groups, though some ventured laterally across department lines. At the
keg Mike drew Brody a cup of beer, then gestured with his head that he was
going to try to get to the food. Brody moved to the wall. The beer was thin
and foamy and almost tasteless: terrible but in its own way also delicious.
He drank half of it in a few gulps, liking the way it felt both warm and cool
as it spread through him. "Brody Mackay, how goes
it?" He turned and there was Russ
Conklin, holding not beer but, as was his custom, a bottle of Odwalla carrot
juice. Russ was short and muscle-bound and perfectly bald, his head shaved
where hair still grew. He was Oiron's founder and CEO, not to mention Brody's
boss, but Brody went way back with him, to when they'd been in . side-by-side
cubes at Wells Fargo twenty-odd years ago. Long after they'd both moved on,
Russ had tracked Brody down at another start-up and sold him on Oiron in a
five-minute phone call. Actually, Russ had sold Brody on Russ, and it had
turned out to be a very good buy. "Just fine," Brody said.
"And yourself?" "Very well. Give me the
ten thousand foot on your conversation with Harker." Harker was the head of I.S.
Solutions, a small software company with some very clever algorithms for the
detection and blocking of the latest sniffer devices. Brody'd spent an hour
on the phone with him that morning, working out the details of a licensing
agreement. "He's sending it to his
legal guy on Monday," Brody said. Russ raised his juice bottle in
a toast. "What I like to hear." He took a swallow and said,
"So what are you up to this weekend?" "Not much. How 'bout you?
Cycling to Russ smiled. He'd gotten
divorced two years ago, and since then he'd been incredibly active, departing
from his workaholic ways for weekend scuba trips, helicopter skiing in the
Canadian Rockies. He was also dating like crazy, though Brody suspected he
was lonely; it was only after his divorce that he'd begun sending e-mails
time-stamped at 3:00 a.m. The witching hour, the hour of Ambien and
cable TV. Brody's phone rang, and he
pulled it from his pocket, saw it was home. Russ clapped his shoulder.
"I'll let you get that" Brody stepped away from the
crowd and watched as Russ moved to a group from sales. He answered. "Is it crazy there?"
Liz said. "Not particularly. We're
having our Friday kegger. How're things there?" "Fine, but we have a
wrinkle for "Eight a.m.?" "I know." Actually, Brody enjoyed early
morning soccer games; that wasn't the issue. He said, "Joe doesn't want
to go?" "Well, he didn't say so.
But you know we wouldn't get home till eleven or so. He's got to be at
warm-ups at seven." "True." "So don't you think?" Brody considered. Of course it
would be best for Joe to get a good night's sleep, but he and Liz had a
history of differing on whether or not best mattered all that much. In the
grand scheme of things, how important was it for a thirteen-year-old boy to
play a soccer game under optimal conditions? When Brody was a kid playing
Little League, his parents had barely known when he had a game, let alone
made sure he got enough sleep the night before. This was tricky ground,
though, because he didn't want to seem like—he wasn't—an uncaring father. "Yeah, you're right,"
he said "We'll do it another time." "You sure?" "Definitely" He
put his phone away and looked at the crowd. Just opposite him, a trio of
engineers peered down at someone's Palm. They looked as if they'd slept in their
clothes, which in fact they might have there was a big deadline next week,
and the feeling of barely controlled frenzy on the third floor was getting
stronger with each passing day. It was all Red Bull up there now, and the
sharp smells of garlic and sweat. These three guys would each drink a Diet
Coke and then go back upstairs, probably be here all weekend. Brody knew that
drill inside out working seventy or eighty hours a week without giving it a
second thought because that was what you did if you wanted to go places. Then
one day you woke up and went: Oh. This is my life I'm living at
this desk. Life
is harder for some people, and the characters in Songs
Without Words are going through a rough patch. Packer has a way of
presenting that will be appreciated by many readers. Steve
Hopkins, September 25, 2007 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Songs Without Words.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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