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THE TROUBLE WITH HAPPINESS

AND OTHER STORIES

Neurasthenic and melancholic but a central work of modern Danish literature.

A brooding collection of stories by the iconic Danish writer.

Ditlevsen, who died in 1976, was no stranger to misery: Addicted to drugs and alcohol, she was committed to psychiatric care several times. Many of the characters she depicts in this slender volume of stories could use professional care themselves. In the opening story, a young woman who “had never demonstrated a special talent of any kind” longs for just two things in life: a man and an umbrella. She attains the first, but the second is slower to arrive. “Sometimes she would lie awake next to Egon, or in her bed in the maid’s room in the house where she worked, nursing her peculiar dream of owning an umbrella,” writes Ditlevsen, and when the woman finally does pull the money together to buy an inexpensive bumbershoot, her enraged husband breaks it over his knee. There the story ends, and one can imagine the couple living miserably ever after. In another story, an aging woman despises any reminder that she will one day die yet introduces a prospective daughter-in-law to everyone in her family, the dead by way of photographs, knowing that one day she’ll be reduced to a few memories and a photo on her sewing table. A botched abortion here, an affair there, a child who, though only 7, “already possessed a great deal of formless anxiety,” a father considered nice only because he does not beat his children—these are the people and events that populate Ditlevsen’s unhappy world. About the only promise of redemption comes in the title story, in which a young woman who inhabits a dank corner of a tiny apartment with her parents, her father “completely superfluous in my mother’s world,” works herself through sheer will into a career as a writer. If this small, gloomy piece is a roman à clef, then Ditlevsen deserves every bit of the reader’s sympathy.

Neurasthenic and melancholic but a central work of modern Danish literature.

Pub Date: April 19, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-3746-0560-5

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022

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INTERMEZZO

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

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THE WEDDING PEOPLE

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.

Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

Pub Date: July 30, 2024

ISBN: 9781250899576

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024

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