The Size of the World - 9780393059090

A novel - set in Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Sicily, and America - about men and women who leave familiar surroundings for foreign landscapes. Their encounters - jolting, unexpected - force them to realize how many "riffs there are to being human." Travelers, colonials, immigrants, and returned ex-pats meet or pass each other in a narrative spanning lifetimes.
Plots wind and twist around each other, making surprising links across a wide field. In the book's opening, an American engineer is sent to Vietnam in 1968 to find out why his company's planes keep drifting off course. The solution shakes him and settles him forever in Thailand, married to a new culture. Another marriage between a Thai Muslim and an American woman leads to a rift with her Sicilian family, and years later, her sad, sweet return home is marked by our government's suspicion of her Asian allegiances. The character most in the spotlight is an American tin prospector in Siam of the 1920s, casual in his colonial stance toward his mistress and his proud Muslim manager. At the end, the prospector is back in the States, ever in love with Asian women and burdened with knowing too much of what happened to the faulty planes.
Love, loss, yearning, self-delusion, and forgiveness are here in ways that are fresh and morally probing. Joan Silber's use of historical material is brilliantly unsentimental and uncondescending. "It's a bigger world these days," one of her characters muses. And in the tradition of E. M. Forster, seeing the size of the world changes the meaning of homesickness for all of these unforgettable men and women.