Grief and fear test a friendship

Songs Without Words
By Ann Packer
Knopf, 321 pp., $24.95

Suicide claims far more victims than the number of people who die by their own hand. The physical and psychic repercussions of fatal and near-fatal self-injury, both immediate and over the long term, are the subject of Ann Packer's absorbing new novel, "Songs Without Words," which follows the author's highly successful 2002 debut novel, "The Dive From Clausen's Pier."

"Songs Without Words" tells the story of Liz and Sarabeth, women in their early 40s whose friendship extends back to their teenage years, when Sarabeth lived with Liz's family after her mother committed suicide. Now they live across the bridge from each other in California, meeting for dinner several times a month to share details and compare notes from their disparate lives - Liz's as a married mother of two who spends her days tending to her children and going to yoga classes; Sarabeth's as a single woman who designs lamps and works as a "stager" for people trying to sell their homes. They are mutually supportive and generous until Liz's 15-year-old daughter, Lauren, overdoses on Tylenol and, hospitalized, faces permanent liver failure or death.

Lauren survives, but the novel's primary question is whether the same will be true for the alliance between her mother and Sarabeth, who becomes emotionally paralyzed upon learning from Lauren's father about the girl's self-destructive act, and fails to contact Liz to offer comfort, sympathy, or help. When Liz, in the wake of the crisis, calls her friend to tell her what she's been through and discovers that Sarabeth is already aware of the event but hasn't been in touch, she feels angry and betrayed. Guilt-ridden ("Liz had saved her, saved her a thousand times over - it was the central truth of her life. Had it been inevitable that she would one day fail Liz?"), Sarabeth keeps telling herself, "This isn't about you." Yet she is tormented by thoughts of her mother's depression, erratic behavior, suicide, and - both before and after her death - absence from Sarabeth's life.

Alternating narrative points of view among the two women, Lauren, and Liz's husband, Brody, Packer does a deft job of piquing the reader's suspense about the course and fate of the longtime friendship, Liz and Brody's marriage, and Lauren's recovery. Her observations about the conflicting emotions that attend suicide and suicidal gestures are evocative and convincing, as when Brody simultaneously anguishes over his daughter's heartache and resents her overdose because of the detrimental effect it will have on Lauren's younger brother, Joe. Lauren's grandmother can't quite look her in the eye, and Liz, following a therapist's advice, struggles to set aside her feelings of guilt in order to free up the energy required to help her daughter get better.

The novel is even more astute in terms of the effects a completed suicide has on survivors long afterward. Sarabeth, enervated over the rupture between herself and Liz, begins taking to bed before 8 p.m., ruminating about her mother, Lorelei: "She'd had some illness, the nature of which was a mystery. Sarabeth had an impression of a woman in a bed, but it was very vague. Who, after all, had Lorelei been but a woman in a bed? And who, these days, was Sarabeth?"

Then there is the friendship Sarabeth struck up in college with a young woman whose father had committed suicide. "They had a kind of routine going, the suicide sisters, that they performed for and with each other." The routine was fueled by competitive griefs: "My mother didn't leave a note"; "My father left a note and didn't mention me."

One aspect of the book that could be stronger is the complexity in the depiction of Lauren's despair. Taking into account that a novel is not a case history, and the fact that teenagers are subject to extreme emotional reactions and impulsivity, the rendering of her psychological state seems a bit facile; Lauren thinks of herself as "ugly" and "a loser," and she takes pills and cuts her wrists in the aftermath of feeling humiliated when a boy she has a crush on smirks at her. There is little to indicate why her distress is overwhelming. Yes, she misses being a little girl and going for cherished bike rides with her father; yes, she got a C-minus on a big paper; yes, her mother doesn't always say the right thing to indicate that she understands what her daughter is feeling. But how do we get from those ordinary adolescent stresses to attempted suicide? Lauren herself doesn't understand ("She saw herself in her closet, crying. What on earth was wrong with her?"), but it would serve the novel if the reader had some sense of what pushed this specific character over the edge.

"Songs Without Words" is an intriguing and well-written exploration of friendship, marriage, parenthood, and the notion that - to quote Flannery O'Connor - "it is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially." Those who appreciate reading about the struggles of characters trying to do the right thing, for themselves and for each other, will find in this novel a gratifying read.

Jessica Treadway is the author of "Absent Without Leave" and "And Give You Peace."