This Is Happiness

Setting aside my extreme appreciation of most things Irish: literature, language, music, landscape, culture, please believe me that you do not want to miss Niall Williams's This is Happiness. Niall Williams's This is Happiness offers irresistible story-telling.

It is 1958, electricity is coming to ever-rainy Faha in County Clare, in the west of Ireland. Noe Crowe is rusticating at his grandparents’ house having found his vocation for the priesthood faltering. Just before the electric men arrive, the rain stops and along comes Christy, to stay as a lodger as the Crowes senior have the rare telephone. He is one of the men involved in electrification but Noe immediately intuits that Christy is not only different but here on a mission. show more Gradually Christy's secret and his purpose emerge and intertwine with Noe's own efforts to figure himself out at least enough to know what direction to move in with his life. The novel is so rewarding I've said enough. Read it.

A sub-theme in the novel is music: As Noe begins to play the fiddle, Christy and Noe bicycle around the region in the hopes of happening upon Junior Crehan playing at a session or dance. If you do read the novel, be sure to go to your browser and look up Junior Crehan, one of County Clare's most wonderful composers and fiddlers of the last century and be sure also to go listen on youtube or wherever to a bit of his music, and listen to him talk about his life. Look up too, the Irish words that pop up here and there in the text.

At one moment, the narrator, Noe (pronounced No, 'short' for Noel--one of countless sly language moments as the Irish language itself contains no word for 'No' -- or 'Yes' for that matter) watches his grandfather standing quietly for hours in his upper field on the small family farm in the village of Faha in Clare, just . . . doing what looks like nothing, just looking about. Subtly but forcefully Williams quietly demonstrates as well what having electricity, that mysterious and now essential enabler of how we live now, will change everything: what will be gained and what will be lost.

The novel is so rich in detail, in humor, so emotionally engaging, so rewarding I've said enough. Read it. *****

Also don't miss History of the Rain which was a best book for me a few years back. show less

The first three pages of the paperback edition of Niall Williams’s This is Happiness are filled with enthusiastic accolades and rave reviews when the hard cover edition initially appeared published by sources like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. Despite the big build up, I was not disappointed—the book was as good as the other reviewers said it was.

The story takes place in 1956 in the tiny fictional village of Faha in County Clare, Ireland, which is near the West Coast, where it rains a lot. Nevertheless, the entire first chapter consists of the sentence: “It had stopped raining.” Things are about to change in Faha because not only is the sun shining, but electricity will be available for the show more first time. [This is actually true—western Ireland was about 40 years behind the rest of “first world” countries in gaining access to electrical power. On the other hand, I’m not sure it is true that it ever stopped raining in County Clare.]

But change wasn’t going to happen very fast. In one of my favorite sentences in a delightfully written book, the author observed, “Nothing happened, and continued to happen.”

As in any novel set in Ireland, the characters must deal with the Catholic Church. The main character, Noel, has recently left the seminary and is living with his grandparents. A particularly officious nun, Mother* Acquin, tells Noel that “his mother in heaven” has sent her to help him renew his priestly vocation. (*Not “sister,” as she corrects at least two characters who would thus bemean her status.)

Christy has come to Faha as part of the crew setting up electricity in Faha, but is also seeking to reunite with a girl he once knew there. His arrival changes Noel’s life.

But the plot and the “action” really don’t matter very much. What is important is the sense of place so eloquently and poignantly created by a masterful novelist. The pervasive tone of the novel is bittersweet, with very little bitter.

I thoroughly enjoyed this heartwarming book.

(JAB) show less

During a mid-century spring marked by unprecedented sunshine, things are changing in the wee village of Faha, County Clare. The electricity is coming in, and the Crowes are on the telephone now. Young Noel Crowe has abandoned Dublin as well as his seminary studies and is struggling to find himself in his grandparents' rural outpost. "Faha was no more nor less than any other place. If you could find it, you'd be on your way somewhere else."

Often accompanied on a rickety bicycle by his grandmother's boarder Christy, an agent of the electric company, Noel spends many evenings seeking the music of a wandering fiddle player widely touted as the finest that ever bowed a string. "Once he heard a tune it never left him...In time Junior Crehan show more carried so much music in him he became a one-man repository...in whose playing was the playing of all those before him on into the mists of the long ago."

Love is in the air, but having trouble finding where to settle. Noel falls, in rapid sequence, for each of the three daughters of the local doctor, simultaneously attempting to mend a decades-old rift between his new friend Christy and the woman he left at the altar.

The novel proceeds at the unhasty pace of a one-horse buggy, and you seriously need to slow down and let it do so. In the hands of an Irish master, the English language sheds all its Anglo-Saxon clunkery, and becomes the music you didn't know you were seeking yourself.

"You live long enough you understand prayers can be answered on a different frequency than the one you were listening for. We all have to find a story to live by and live inside, or we couldn't endure the certainty of suffering. That's how it seems to me."

Give yourself a gift; read this one without giving a thought to when you will finish or what you will read next. show less

An Irish book that's not depressing? The world turned upside down! Just when I had begun to believe the price that one paid for gorgeous storytelling and lyric Irish prose was tragedy and despair. :-)

This is the memoir of 17yr old Noel Crowe, living with his grandparents in an Irish village that would seem to have been forgotten by time: though the year is 1960, they're still living in sod houses, using peat for fuel, relying on communal phones, driving horse carts to church, and waiting for electricity. (Imagine learning about Sputnik from the newspapers because you're still living in a place without televisions or radios! The cognitive dissonance is real.) The story is told in first person by Noe as a senior citizen, reflecting back show more on a few extraordinary months of his youth, when the rain in Faha inexplicably ceased to fall and he, Noe, took the first, formative steps towards acquiring the wisdom that now informs his perspectives on life.

Having left his religious education behind and unsure of what he wants out of life, Noe comes under the influence of Christy, an older, gentle wanderer who has arrived at Faha to help electrify the town. Under Christy's benign tutelage, Noe gradually comes to understand that life is equal parts pain and pleasure, but it's often the pain that makes the pleasure possible. "I saw the sorrow in his happiness had made shine his eyes" Noe at one point says of Christy - how beautiful and Irish is that?

Along the way we are treated to lovely vignettes about the inhabitants of Faha, some gorgeously evocative prose (especially about sun and rain), an homage to the simplicity of rural living, a brief primer on Irish folk music, an exploration of the nature of storytelling, romantic adolescent misadventures, a poignant love story, and a provocative exploration of human nature: our fear of change, our foibles, but also our enormous capacity for empathy.

The best piece of advice I can give to potential readers: don't try to speed your way through this! The pleasure of the tale is in slowing down and letting the charm of the story, the beauty of the prose, and the wistfulness of the themes enfold you. In fact, some of the members of my book club highly recommended doing this as an audiobook, in order to fully appreciate the cadence and lyricism of Williams' language. As for me, I may even give Irish authors a second chance. show less

I listened to this in audiobook format.

This novel is about a young man's coming of age in a small Irish village just before the dawn of modernity. There's a few plot arcs but the real story here in the storytelling itself. This is a sublime example of the use of language to evoke time, place, and character. Rich with nostalgia, the storyteller (the young man himself decades later) reminisces about a simpler time, a simpler place, and a people for whom community was everything. I loved the humor, the perfect turns of phrase, and the positively uplifting quality in a time when so many books are grief-stricken. Highly recommend.

Now this is what I recognise as Irish writing. What is evident in his writing is that it comes from a deep love for his people and his country. He writes of their idiosyncracies with affection and acceptance. His writing is peopled with wonderfully drawn characters and vivid rural images. So yes it is a character driven novel but also a love story, not only between man and woman but between friends, grandparents and community.

Noe, short for Noel, is a teenage orphan who recently moved from Dublin to live with his grandparents in a small Irish town. Just prior, he enrolled in a seminary with the thought of seeking a priestly calling, but dropped out. Instead, he is now trying to find direction in life. Suddenly, in his small community of Faha, it stopped raining, and the sun came out. The sun never stays out in this rainy realm of the world, but it did here.

The sun, of course, metaphorically stands for new knowledge’s light to shine on all of life. Although Faha’s residents are first overjoyed with the natural light, it exposes problems and details not before seen. In a story set 60 years ago, the Irish government is spreading electricity to even the show more smallest places. An employee named Christy enters the town to dwell in Noe’s house, and it soon becomes clear that he came not at the electric company’s bidding but at his heart’s tugging.

In the ensuing drama, Noe learns about love – not just the sentimental sort either. No, he learns about enduring love, the kind that brings about broken hearts lasting a lifetime. He sees value in being the outlier in a village by doing one’s own thing when everyone else does another. He learns what happiness truly means. This tale could only be set in Ireland, oppressed for centuries by the British so that the Irish became enchanted with the joy of the smallest things. Noe went to seminary to learn to live; he left confused; and in these days in Faha, he learned to live again. From Christy, his grandparents, and the entire village, he learned happiness.

The narrative grips from the beginning, not from an titilating plot line but from the words’ innate strength. Niall Williams knows how to enliven a good story that consumes a reader’s mind with vivid imagery, strong central ideas, and deep meaning. A bookish friend recommended this work to me “without reservation,” and I will concur with that recommendation. Like the sun in Faha, this book exposes new light in the human pursuit of happiness. show less