It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.
I love me an Irish storyteller, and having previously loved Niall Williams’ History of the Rain, I thought that This is Happiness would be a slam dunk — but it was more of a shot that circles the rim forever before falling off; edge of your seat in the moment without ultimate satisfaction. And it’s hard to put my finger on why this took me so long to read — I kept falling asleep after a couple of chapters and was never excited to pick it up again — but still, it has really fine and interesting writing, engaging characters, and thoughtfulness behind the plot; it just failed to score with me. Rounding down to three stars out of sheer exhaustion.
When you saw someone in the river your first thought was not swimming, it was drowning. In a lifetime there’s more than one doorway. Even as I was running I think I knew this was one. It’s not so easy to run across a field in springtime, and in my memory a field like Ganga’s, pock and lump, dung and rushes and slick April grass, was treachery. And because an old man has only the story of his own life I am running across it still, a lanky seventeen-year-old from Dublin, shy and obdurate both, running with a premonition that I thought was doom but was maybe fate if you’re a party to that. I was running believing I was going to save him, when of course it was he who would save me.
As it opens, This is Happiness sees seventeen-year-old Noel “Noe” Crowe leaving the seminary with a crisis of faith, and when he elects to spend some time with his rural paternal grandparents (whom he calls Ganga and Doadie), Noe couldn’t have known that this would be at a time of profound local change; changes that would affect his own life’s path. Noe is telling this story from the vantage of old age — he states that these events happened over six decades earlier, so somewhere in the 1950’s — and we get the benefit of both hearing the well-worn stories that made such an impact on a once naive youth and the meaning that was made of the events over the course of sixty years. The major events: A long string of hot and sunny days in this famously drenched corner of Ireland spurs wonder and impatience; electricity is finally run to the village of Faha and its surrounds; Noe suffers an injury and falls hard for the doctor’s daughters; Noe’s grandparents provide lodging for one of the electricity workers, and this Christy is a larger-than-life character who will demonstrate for Noe a deeper way of feeling and living:
”O ho now!” I shouted, both of us happy as heathens beneath the warm breath of night sky and pedalling now in the boy hectic of blind momentum and nocturnal velocity so we missed the turn at Crossan’s went straight and straight on and straight in through Crossan’s open gate and across the wild bump-bump-bump and sudden su-su-su suck of their bog meadow where my front wheel sank in a rushy rut and I and a cry and a jet of brown vomit were projected out over the handlebars and flew glorious for one long and sublime instant before landing face-first in the cold puddle and muck of reality.
Noe is a believable and sympathetic character, tottering over the brink of adulthood; Ganga and Doadie are colourful and authentic and everything you’d want your grandparents to be; and Christy brings the hijinx and the heartache, and as he and Noe go pub-crawling throughout the county in search of a (locally) legendary fiddle player, Christie is capable of unironically throwing his head back, and with eyes closed and fists clenched, serenading the air with timeless songs of love and loss:
Christy sang. I cannot tell you how startling it was. If you believe in a soul, as I do, then my soul stirred. The song was not composed by Christy, but by the alchemy of performance, you felt it was. It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.
And maybe that’s the crux of it — a dangerous line for any novelist to provide for a reader — as much as I did like moments in this book, I don’t leave it feeling illuminated. To return to my b-ball analogy: This was like a long game of pickup with a good sweat and some nice plays, but no one’s keeping score, and nothing about it makes this outing on the court feel more exceptional than the hundreds of other times I’ve been there. Worthwhile, but not remarkable.
