Review: ‘Secrets of Happiness,’ by Joan Silber | Arts & Entertainment

We don’t want to acknowledge it, but our lives are more transactional than we care to admit. We make trade-offs, weigh accounts, seek payback. Is our complicated relationship with money the root of the resentment grinding away in our hearts? We pretend wealth doesn’t matter even as we bristle over its absence.

But here’s a better question: Does all this psychological and financial accounting make us happy? Joan Silber’s characters wrestle with the idea in her exceptional new novel “Secrets of Happiness,” which ranges from Manhattan and Queens to Leeds, Bangkok and Phnom Penh as Silber considers what we owe ourselves and each other and how we complicate our paths to contentment.

Like her dazzling novel “Improvement,” which won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction,…