Newspaper Article

'SILENCE' IS GOLDEN MANY VOICES BLEND SMOOTHLY INTO A HARROWING STORY

Reviewed by Jack Fuller, The Tribune's executive editor and author, most recently, of "Our Fathers' Shadows "

1987

Overview

A promising but elusive young woman, admired for all the usual reasons, dies of an overdose in Manhattan. Whether the story of this sadly ordinary event comes to anything depends on how the writer decides to tell it. For Madison Smartt Bell in his latest book, \"The Year of Silence,\" the death is like a crystal, a transparant, sharp-edged fact that refracts all light and separates the colors. The story becomes many stories, a collection, each of them in its own way pure and whole. The most trivial way to describe Bell's approach is to say that every chapter examines the death of the young woman known as Marian from a different point of view: that of her lover, her drug connection, the street freak she gives money to, the cop who is called to the scene.

• Publisher: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC