What exactly is happiness? As an emotional state it certainly beats being misery, but how do you go about attaining it? Does it spring from love in all its wondrous myriad forms? How about a big bag of money? Does money guarantee happiness? Not necessarily, if this novel is anything to go by, although I wouldn’t mind putting that to the test. Our American friends enshrined the very notion of it in their mission statement. Mind you, they worded it as “the pursuit of happiness” because they knew it took work.
Joan Silber, whose last book, Improvement, took home several medals, constructs a set of interconnecting stories that get under the bonnet of this “happiness” idea. Competing narrators chart lives overlapping, as so many do in both mundane and unlikely ways, and one of the joys of reading Silber’s work is spotting these connections as each voice takes its turn.
Secrets of Happiness is bookended by Ethan, whose Manhattan family discover that their father and husband Gil, a wealthy rag trader, has another family on the go over in Queens. Ethan has entanglements of his own. His lover Kirk’s ex, Saul, is still in the building and is losing his battle with leukaemia. It is a cliche but all cliches have a ring of truth – your health is your wealth.
“Nobody hates money,” Gil is quoted as saying, but it doesn’t always bring out the best in people either. He cruelly brings his first family to the restaurant where the mother of family number two works as a hostess. Frankie, a free-spirited ex-girlfriend of Gil, embarrasses herself by asking her old beau for money, and Tad, whose brother was working on a documentary with Frankie’s daughter – you may need to scribble down a few notes as you go along – steps on a broken heart in an effort to sort an insurance pay-out. Characters who turn their back on gain – such as Bud, who refuses an inheritance and whose freewheeling chapter seemed pleasingly Kerouacian to this reader – have a better run of it.
By the time the novel circles back to Ethan, there is an acceptance of what Silber’s brilliantly realised bird’s-eye view has shown us. The people we are connected to are crucial to our happiness, just as we are to theirs. That’s what matters. A bit of grin-and-bear-it, a bit of come-and-share-it. Reasons to be cheerful, 1, 2, 3.
