Many lifetimes, effortlessly drawn

JOAN SILBER (BARRY GOLDSTEIN)

The Size of the World
By Joan Silber
Norton, 322 pp., $23.95

Joan Silber, 2005 National Book Award finalist, has written a sublime and humane jigsaw puzzle of a novel. Through her wide-angled lens, she spans decades, cultures, countries, then zooms in on six characters' particularized points of view:

In the late 1960s, Toby, a newly minted engineer, encounters the enigmatic Ernst. The two unmarrieds working for Bydex are sent to Vietnam to figure out why the company's systems are causing planes to fly off course. Toby's scared; Ernst, rumored to be CIA, is tougher. They struggle though the rainy season, argue about the war, and suffer a rocket attack. On R&R to Bangkok, Toby meets Toon, who nurses his wounds and becomes his wife. "So I was going to live in Bangkok and I didn't speak a word of Thai, so what? So I was swearing to live forever with someone I hardly knew, why not?" In a foreign country, surrounded by demanding relatives, Toby tries to find his place in the world.

Kit, Toby's ex-girlfriend, narrates the next section. After separating from her husband, she travels to Mexico - "I did not think I was a traveler: I liked my comfort, I was not always brave, and I was only starting to be curious." There she goes native, buying shawls, hammocks, and weavings "with the hope that mimicry could take me closer to something worth knowing." She fears Marie Antoinette tendencies, copes with love affairs, her daughter's difficult adolescence, and endures. Knowing how screwed up the world is provides comfort.

Corinna recounts the third part. Her family has moved from upstate New York to Florida in 1924. Her brother Owen, a geologist searching for tin, is off in Siam. Though her father hits Florida's land-boom jackpot, in their second year they "had to let the cook go." Corinna thinks, "I was angry with my father, whose boyish itch for more than we needed had brought us here." After her parents' death, she joins Owen in Siam, where she falls in love with a Muslim. As Corinna explores her new landscape, she realizes her memories of home are as blurry as the jungle she now lives in.

Next up is Mike, who teaches a course called "Patterns of Civic Unrest in the Post-Colonial World." Married with four kids, he misses his high school girlfriend Viana, whose parents were Sicilian immigrants, and feels stuck: "I always felt funny teaching courses in global whatever when I'd never been anywhere." Visiting the old neighborhood, he discovers that "Viana LoBianco had run off with a Muslim from some country and her parents had cut her off." Viana returns to Hoboken with her daughter, reunites with Mike, and, after 9/11, gets into trouble with the FBI.

Viana's mother, Annunziata, relates the fifth tale. An immigrant in Hoboken who grew up south of Palermo, she loved Mussolini and "hated Americans." She mourns the death of her brother in North Africa, deplores wartime food shortages, describes a romance with her neighbor Umberto, whom she marries. Grateful for the New World's plentiful food and "a trip across the river to New York City, where I walked on the avenues as good as anyone," she still acknowledges that if it hadn't been for her husband, she would have fled back to Sicily. Though she and Umberto have renounced Viana since her move to Thailand with her Muslim husband, they travel to Asia on a rescue mission to bring her home. In the process, Annunziata learns more about "the great swarming world" than she had ever wanted to.

Owen, Corinna's brother, back from Siam, offers the final testimony. In Kingston, N.Y., after the crash of 1929, he finds a salesman's job at Universal Screw and Fastener, which, though a step down, "at least . . . had to do with metals and the world of matter." His work takes him to Arizona to sell screws to companies building planes "to soar over Vietnam." When the planes crash, Owen, "a cog in a corrupt machine," realizes that despite his adventures overseas, even more can happen at home. With this, the book comes full circle.

Such questions about the nature of home and what it means to be a foreigner lie at the heart of this novel. Each story is filled with many "Aha!" moments; the connective tissue between sections is as smooth as a bolt of Thai silk. Without heralding, Silber covers all the big themes: morality, culture, paradise lost and found, longing, forgiveness, and love.

Because there is so much to admire here, it seems niggling to voice any complaint. Still, trying to fit the pieces together (ah, that's the brother and this was the first wife and here's the brother again 200 pages later) often proved distracting. Nevertheless, always intrigued, I found my way. After all, no matter what the size of the world, Joan Silber's universe is both small enough to contain - and big enough to reveal - the family of man.

Mameve Medwed's fifth novel, "Of Men and Their Mothers," has just been published.