Then Claire met Jay. Fresh off the Internet and speed-dating circuit, she casually struck up a conversation with the research psychologist in the cafe across from her art studio, impressed that he seemed so bright, open, sensitive, and easy to be with. But Jay was also a self-confessed depressive who every few months abruptly descended into a dark, suffocating immobility, spending days curled in bed, refusing to speak. Yet he shunned medication for the flatness it made him feel and managed to keep his illness a secret from those outside his family. And he was charming, warm, and endearing when he emerged from his “spells,’’ so Claire found herself ultimately falling in love.
Claire believed they were handling Jay’s episodes fairly well when, just a year and nine months into their marriage, Jay abruptly killed himself, walking off a balcony during a friend’s party. He left behind not just a cryptic suicide note, which Claire initially can’t bear to read, but a whole suicide binder, including four typed pages of care directions about his cat Fang. The frail stray Jay had taken in long before their marriage becomes Claire’s most direct, if begrudging, link to her dead husband.
“Happy Now?’’ begins just after Jay’s wake and follows Claire as she tries to make sense of what has happened and what will be. The novel vividly captures the sense of dislocation and disenfranchisement that must surely accompany such a loss. Moving into the coach house of her married, pregnant sister, Nomie, Claire must deal not only with her feelings of loss and sadness, but also with a justifiable anger colored by undercurrents of shame and guilt. How could she have missed the depths of Jay’s misery? One of the most visceral moments in the novel occurs when she realizes the suicide support group she has joined is not for those left behind, but for those who have attempted suicide and failed. Claire unleashes her fury at the group, choking out, “I could tell you about the pain you’ve caused. . . . You should be ashamed of yourselves.’’
For the most part, “Happy Now?’’ is slowly paced, with no great dramatic arc or startling revelations. The story catapults between present, recent past, and long-ago memories, and throughout, the writing is a little obtuse, disjunct, and filled with tangential, sometimes confusing details. And some of Claire’s family’s dysfunction seems a little contrived.
However, the wandering narrative effectively serves to keep the reader slightly off balance in the way we imagine Claire herself must be as she grapples with finding meaning, if not exactly “happiness,’’ in the here and now as well as some sense of hope for the future.
Karen Campbell is a freelance writer based in Brookline.
