This is Happiness
Niall Williams, 2020
Bloomsbury USA
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781635574203
Summary
A 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 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1958
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—B.A., M.A., University College Dublin
• Currently—lives in Kiltumper, County Clare, Ireland
Niall Williams is a playwright, author. He was born in Dublin, where years later her studied English and French literature at University College Dublin and eventually graduated with a Master's degree in Modern American Literature.
After his univesity years, hHe moved to New York in 1980 where he married Christine Breen, whom he had met while she was a Master's student also at UCD Williams took his first job opening boxes of books in a bookshop in Mount Kisco. Later, he worked as a copywriter for Avon Books in New York City before deciding to try life as a writer.
In 1985 he and his wife left America, returning to Ireland to the cottage in west Clare that Chris's grandfather had left eighty years before to find his life in America.
Williams's first four books were co-written with his wife, Chris, telling of their life together in Kiltumper in west Clare. His first of three plays, The Murphy Initiative, was staged in 1991 at The Abbey Theatre in Dublin. His second, A Little Like Paradise, was produced on the Peacock stage of The Abbey Theatre in 1995, and his third, The Way You Look Tonight, was produced by Galway's Druid Theatre Company in 1999. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Williams has painted a lush, wandering portrait of Faha, a village back in time in County Clare, Ireland.…"Oh, just shut up and take me back to Faha," I wanted to interject at times. But I couldn’t and wouldn’t; he’s too sweet a fellow…. Be kind, he admonishes the reader directly at one point, and it’s a testament to this bighearted novel that I felt duly chastened, almost like a member of the clan.
Elizabeth Graver - New York Times Book Review
The Ireland that Niall Williams writes about in this novel is gone — or would be if he hadn’t cradled it so tenderly in the clover of his prose. Escaping into the pages of This Is Happiness feels as much like time travel as enlightenment.… Williams’s most affecting skill is his ability to narrate this novel in two registers simultaneously, capturing Noe’s naivete as a teen and his wisdom as an old man.… If you’re a reader of a certain frame of mind, craving a novel of delicate wit laced with rare insight, this, truly, is happiness.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
In the pre-modern idyll fashioned by Mr. Williams, beauty stands out a little more sharply, and feelings are experienced with more directness and intensity.… A meandering, often delightful, rural rhapsody, This Is Happiness recalls only what was sublime about the simple life in Faha.… There is no small amount of blarney in this. I laughed out loud at Noel’s astonishing claim that "there was little culture of complaint" during that era, as though glorious grumblers like Sean O’Casey and Patrick Kavanagh had never put pen to paper.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
Williams balances carefully between nostalgia and clear-eyed realism.… [V]ivid character sketches abound ... Jumbling chronology and interjecting retrospective opinions as everyone does when remembering the past, Noe warmly evokes a village immersed in the timeless rhythms of nature and the rituals of the Catholic Church, counterpointed by blunt depictions of the bone-deep fatalism of people who know that outsiders view them as backward.… Noe’s musings may occasionally dip into sentimentality, but it’s honest sentiment honestly acquired from his embrace of the full spectrum of human experience — a lesson he learned during the transformative months eloquently captured in Niall Williams’s tender, touching novel.
Wendy Smith - Boston Globe
This is a charming, often moving book, enriched by beautifully drawn characters and brilliantly depicted scenes from country life. The narrative unfurls at a languid pace: We drift from Easter services to games of Gaelic football, from pub sessions to house dances. And yet we happily surrender to the gentle rhythms of the drama and the lilting cadences of the prose. Again and again Williams ensures there is musicality in standard descriptions and poetry gilding commonplace truths.… Williams has written a memorable novel that vividly brings alive both a different era and two different male characters—"knights of first and last loves."
Malcolm Forbes - Minneapolis Star Tribune
Charming is one word for Williams’ prose. It is also life-affirming and written with a turn of phrase that makes the reader want to underline something on every page.… This is not a book to read for fast-moving developments. It is one to savour, slowly, like the way of life it enshrines. The supporting cast is huge, eccentric, frequently funny.
Isabel Berwick - Financial Times (UK)
[G]lorious and lyrical prose ... Noe’s reminiscences of that period are full of beauty and hard-won wisdom. This novel is a delight.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) The beauty and power of Irish author Niall Williams' writing lies in his ability to invest the quotidian with wonder. A truly peerless wordsmith, he even makes descriptions of gleaming white appliances and telephone wire sing…the book is hilarious among its many other virtues. Buy, rent, get your hands on this book somehow and savor every word of it. Its title says it all: Plunging into This is Happiness is happiness indeed.
BookPage
(Starred review) With a beckoning gentleness that belies the deeper philosophies at play, superb Irish author Williams offers a lilting, magical homage to time and redemption, and a stirring, sentimental journey into the mysteries of love and the possibilities of friendship.
Booklist
(Starred review) Warm and whimsical, sometimes sorrowful, but always expressed in curlicues of Irish lyricism, this charming book makes varied use of its electrical metaphor, not least to express the flickering pulse of humanity. A story both little and large and one that pulls out all the Irish stops.
Kirkus Reviews
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