Fools

At the start of this novel made up of six interconnected stories, rebellious teen Vera, a child of Christian missionaries, falls in love with her third cousin, Joe. The pair move to New York's Greenwich Village, where they fall into a circle of like-minded anarchists including the then-unknown Dorothy Day. A later story is told from the perspective of their daughter, Louise, who is raised under the shadow of her father's imprisonment, a fate he chose over serving in World War II. Set in India, New York, Paris, and Florida between 1920 and the present, other tales are more far-flung, and discovering the connections among them is part of the book's allure. Every character here—the idealists, dreamers, and cynics alike—could be one of the "fools" of the title, as Silber makes clear in her loving but clear-eyed account of her characters' foibles.