Niall Williams, This Is Happiness

I don't know if this is happiness, exactly, reading This Is Happiness, but how can you not open a review of this extremely Irish novel by asking that very question?

It's a novel of language, Niall Williams' This Is Happiness, a novel of rhythm, of the speaking voice and the blarney and the lilting whatnot that the world over has seduced us all into shamrock shakes and "no snakes in Ireland" and green beer and all the rest, by god, and it's such a compelling read. Admittedly, it's less affecting when you remember that in high school, a vaguely British accent might be enough for someone else to get the girl, so to speak, thus making you doubt the value of a novel's simply sounding Irish when its author is Irish, and it was even less affecting when for a brief period I was hearing it as if it was being read by the dulcet tones of   the ham-tongued Ontariese of   the late Stuart McLean (a delivery which Leah McLaren once wonderfully called "a reprehensibly practised mélange of every small-town accent from Come By Chance to Coquitlam"), but as long as I kept the brilliant Adrian Dunbar in mind, this novel came across as genius.

Synopsis: Our 78-year-old narrator recalls the spring of the year he was 17, namely 1958, when he walked away from the seminary to a not-yet-electrified village on the west coast of Ireland to live with his grandparents. More or less magically, it stops raining on the novel's first page, for the first time in recorded memory. On the same day, an older man subsequently moves temporarily into our narrator's loft. His job is to help persuade the villagers to sign up for electricity, but it turns out that he's there because of a love he'd abandoned, under regrettable circumstances that he's regretted ever since, some 50 years before. Through all this, young Noel Crowe begins to learn of love, both on his own and from old Christy, and old Noel our narrator gives up hints of what else he's learned and lost since he left Faha so many years before.

As it happens, lately I'd already been thinking about the passage of time, and of the passages of loves as well, for reasons both plain and complicated that I won't be getting into here, thank you very much for asking, and so when This Is Happiness chimed up next on the Beer and Books reading list, I was well conditioned to dwell on and in the various positions of Noel and Christy. (Can I avoid writing in the style of Niall Williams? Reader, no, I cannot, and I can't bring myself to mind doing so.) The strangeness of time leaves all of us with questions, a few of which rise to the level of regret, and not many of which should be asked, and in this I'm no different. For me there's an abiding mystery still in the gravel of a Melissa Etheridge vocal, another in the Greyhound logo; for these and many other pangs, This Is Happiness was a joy, even if it was at the same time a reminder of my age and of years gone irretrievably by.

It's not for everyone, this novel. The book club scored it a little higher than 50%, which is higher than I expected but didn't reflect my complicated satisfaction with its (and my) recollection of days gone by, of loves lost, of grandparents long buried.

But the thing is, it's unmistakably individual. And in these chatbot times, that alone might well make it worth your time, and who knows: it might even give you back some memories of your own, and at my age, halfway between young Noel Crowe and old Noel, that's become one of the great pleasures.