NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST and REAL SIMPLEA profound and enchanting new novel from Booker Prize-longlisted author Niall Williams about the loves of our lives and the joys of reminiscing. You don’t see rain stop, but you sense it. You sense something has changed in the frequency you’ve been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and … been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you, which at first is only: something has changed.
The rain is stopping. Nobody in the small, forgotten village of Faha remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard was a condition of living. Now–just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of electricity–it is stopping. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is standing outside his grandparents’ house shortly after the rain has stopped when he encounters Christy for the first time. Though he can’t explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.
This is the story of all that was to follow: Christy’s long-lost love and why he had come to Faha, Noel’s own experiences falling in and out of love, and the endlessly postponed arrival of electricity–a development that, once complete, would leave behind a world that had not changed for centuries.
Niall Williams’ latest novel is an intricately observed portrait of a community, its idiosyncrasies and its traditions, its paradoxes and its inanities, its failures and its triumphs. Luminous and otherworldly, and yet anchored with deep-running roots into the earthy and the everyday, This Is Happiness is about stories as the very stuff of life: the ways they make the texture and matter of our world, and the ways they write and rewrite us.
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If you are a descendant of Ireland, I don’t care how many generations back, this sweet thought-provoking book could be just what you need to read as you begin the new year. It is a book about coming…coming of age, coming of electricity, and mostly for all the characters in this wonderful novel, about change coming. It is set in Fa-Fa, a small Irish parish, unchanged in a thousand years. But the changes are apparent everywhere. Generations of children have grown and gone off faraway to make their lives. Till there are only a few young stragglers left behind with all the older folks. It is a tender portrait of community. The prose is so beautiful that it must be read aloud at times. I re-read many paragraphs- not because I couldn’t make sense of them but rather because they were simply so cleverly written. The author doesn’t just write pretty words, the characters are well developed and the plot has surprises and depth that stays with the reader long after reading the novel.
Gorgeous writing. Fascinating bit of history, too
A treat to listen to this gentle coming-of-age story of a young teen in Ireland. No’s retreat to his grandparents home after a year of seminary to re-assess his life brings him to a tiny town but a huge friendship with Christy, a roustabout romantic who has forgiveness to seek in the village. The sweet and slow unwinding of Christy’s failed love affair against the backdrop of the long awaited installation of electricity to the village is a tonic for those yearning for a human story of connection.
Everything – everything Niall Williams writes is magic and pure poetry. My favorite author. If I could string words as he does, I would write a beautiful, eloquent review. I cannot. Just read every word this man writes.
I loved this book so much, I went on to read two more books by Niall Williams, and loved them as well. Beautiful writing!
Gentle, soft, and full of humor, This is Happiness is built around a 78 year old seminarian dropout giving an oral history of a town in Ireland circa 1920 that is about to get electricity for the first time. Expertly narrated with gorgeous prose about Ireland’s weather and landscape, the novel lingers on small, poignant moments that are so relatable from teenage embarrassments to first loves to visiting your grandparents. Williams creates a fictional town that is so real and hopeful despite being so “behind the times.” Williams argues that every life has a story and our greatest happinesses are those framed in sorrow. This is Happiness is not sappy or Hallmark movie-esque. It revels in small relatable human moments and tragedies while creating a town the reader wishes his grandparents lived in. The prose is expert-level from Williams and while the pacing of the story is plodding, it is intentional so we focus on each line and each moment individually. Rewarding read that easily brings a smile to my face.
Literary fiction creates and portrays characters and settings that are vivid, poignant if not unforgettable. If does more, of course. It is told with beautiful prosody in a compelling, charming, unique voice. It is dramatic without succumbing to melodrama. It pulls at the reader’s heartstrings without slipping into sentimentality. Each of these literary virtues shape This is Happiness, the ninth novel authored by the Irish writer Niall Williams, whose previous novel, History of Rain, was longlisted in 2014 for the Mann Booker Prize.
This is Happiness is populated with several remarkable characters. The narrator is 78-year old Noe Crowe, who tells the story of a spring and summertime he spent with his grandparents in 1958 when he was 17 in a fictious village known as Faha, County Clare, Ireland. Noe was then a recent seminary-school dropout, mourning the recent death of his mother. Because the narrator reminisces about events six decades in the past, he can credibly make more meaningful observations about these memories specifically and life generally than he could have when he was seventeen. Moreover, the stories do not have to be told in the voice of a teenager but rather can (and do) transition into adult-speak before returning to the believable voice of a youth experiencing the events as they are told. The adult observations and asides contribute to the remarkable voice created and heard in this novel.
Noe comes to Faha from Dublin to live with his grandparents, Ganga and Doady, who live on a farmstead on the outskirts of Faha. In 1958, Faha, County Clare, Ireland, where the novel is set, is a (fictional) village where halfway through the 20th Century “the parish finally steps out of the 19th”. Not one character fits the stereotype of an Irish-country bumpkin. To the contrary, while Ganga and Doady are the first householders to have a telephone in the environs of Faha, they are the only ones who refuse to take the electricity when it arrives in the village toward the end of the novel: a delightful surprise that seems to have been inevitable after the fact.
Faha is made exceptionally vivid by the fact that to get around, Noe usually must walk or ride a bike. Therefor most scenes are described as Noe passes them by at an ambulatory rather than an expressway pace. The pace is so gentle that it’s (almost) as if the reader can taste the dust rising from the unpaved roads in late spring and summer dry heat. At night one can only see by the light of the moon or the flame of a candle as the villagers wait for the promised electrification.
Shortly after arriving in Faha, Noe meets Christy McMahon, who becomes his grandparents’ lodger, sharing a room with Noe. Christy has come to Faha for professional and personal reasons. Professionally he’s there as an employee of the electric company to assist with the sale of electricity to the populace and to assist with the logistics of electrification. Personally, he’s come to try and make amends to Annie Mooney, whom he left standing at the altar decades before. Of course, this brings to the reader’s mind as well a Noe’s, the great Charles Dickens character, Ms. Havisham. But Annie, who is no Ms. Havisham, having moved on to a splendid marriage to another and with no apparent psychological wounds, is distinctly uninterested in meeting Christy again, let alone conversing with him. Noe recalls:
“I was surprised that Christy was not more downtrodden by the impasse with Annie. . . . I asked him why.
“‘Noe,’ he said, and drew a theatrical breath, ‘this is happiness.’
I gave him back the sort of look you give those a few shillings short of a pound.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Whenever I said that it used to drive my wife mad.
‘You were married?’
‘I was. She left me for a better man. God bless her,’ he said, and nodded down the valley after the memory of her. He smiled, quoting himself: ‘This is happiness.’
It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand it to mean you could stop at, not all, but most moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter the state of your head or heart, to say This is happiness, because of the simple truth, you were alive to say it.
I think of that often. We can all pause right here, raise our head, take a breath and accept that This is Happiness, and the bulky blue figure of Christy cycling across the next life would be waving a big slow hand in the air at all of us coming along behind him.”
This (a moment in a lifetime) is happiness because at whatever moment in life you choose, you can pause and reflect that you are still alive. This defeats the alternative, usually, and for most of our lives. For in such a moment of reflection, taking stock, one can change course, aiming for a different destination from the one momentum had been taking you. It is therefore in this context that the reader is left to ponder Noe’s first kisses, exchanged with the inestimable, Charlene (Charlie) Troy.
“The time it takes for one face to meet another’s is in fact no time, it’s so charged as to be outside of ordinary measure . . . My kiss is the lightest touch on a surface soft and sticky. It’s a kiss of imagination and worship. . .
“Charlie’s kisses were, I suppose, in The Book of Kisses . . . in the chapter called devouring. There was biting and gnawing and teeth-banging in them, an urgent air of mouth-to-mouth combat . . .”
This is Happiness is, as I hope these brief quotes and my comments show, an exceptional novel. There are, however, passages in the reviews of This is Happiness that are critical of the novel and with which I disagree. The following was said by Elizabeth Graver in The New York Times Book Review:
“Where the book’s digressions sometimes bog down are in its more self-reflective moments: Noe the storyteller defending himself against charges (but whose?) of sentimentality and holding forth on the relationship between story and truth, the real and the imagined, and the enriching merits of the arts.”
It is these self-reflective moments that give life to the extraordinary voice that narrates This is Happiness and to the events, feelings, and insights remembered.
In The Washington Post, the critic Ron Charles wrote:
“If Faha isn’t for everybody, then neither, frankly, is Williams’s novel, delivered in the pensive voice of a man in his 70s recalling his youth. ‘This in miniature was the world,’ he writes, but that demands a kind of attention and patience that’s increasingly scarce. If you’re in a hurry, hurry along to another book.”
I don’t imagine that fans of literary fiction are in too much of a hurry not to linger over the exceptional prose or be stirred by Noe’s sixty-year-old reminiscences. Nor do I agree that the voice is pensive.
After satisfying myself that I’d rebutted such criticisms, I concluded without further hesitation that this novel deserves five stars. If you read it, you will be entertained and enriched.
One of the most lyrical novels I’ve ever read. Beautiful.
This was a journey to a simpler place in a simpler time.
Lovely.
Words. I loved this book for all the words. My grandmother was the daughter of Irish immigrants and I could hear her and my great-aunts talking and laughing and using so many of the phrases. Delightful wandering book full of delightful characters. I didn’t want it to end. I will read more from this author.
An older man looks back on the summer when he was a teenager and lived with his grandparents in rural Ireland after the death of his mother. Poignant story of a time when his grandparent’s village had no electricity and the summer it was installed. A coming of age story.
Although it took me a while to get into the mood of the book, I sank deeper and deeper into it as its humor began to make me laugh out loud.
Loved this so much I bought copies for my sister’s and 2 cousins. The Irish wit and his prose were wonderful.
A lyrical expose of life in Ireland in bygone days revealing the good and the bad in human nature.