This Is Happiness by Niall Williams

Oh, how I loved this book! My primary interest in fiction is a sense of place, and this novel explores place in a variety of ways. It’s set in the Irish village of Faha in County Clare, which was also featured in Niall Williams’ previous novel, “History of the Rain” (longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize). In this new work, the narrator, Noe (short for Noel), is a 78-year-old man looking back to the spring of 1958, a summer when, miraculously, it never rains and when “the electricity” is about to come to this rural backwater. Noe has dropped out of the seminary after his mother’s death, reeling from grief, and gone to live with his grandparents in Faha, where he’d spent time as a child.

This is a novel that is as leisurely as it’s possible to get. As if to emphasize how slowly time moves in a “forgotten elsewhere,” Wlliams never rushes his plot or his prose. Faha comes alive in his hands with lovingly detailed descriptions of both the place and the social and cultural intricacies: “In the fields the cattle, made slow-witted by the rain, lifted their rapt and empty faces, heavy loops of spittle hanging, as though they ate watery light.”

What I found most extraordinary, though, is how he plumbs the depths of single moments, somehow conveying the quality of existence and, for lack of a better word, transcendence, in a way few writers can (Proust being one). Here’s an example of what I mean, plucked out of several pages of a description of a humble man singing a song in a pub: “He sang. After the first few lines I couldn’t look at him. Nobody could look at him. It felt like an intimacy you weren’t entitled to, but knew it privileged you and you didn’t dare move in case you broke whatever had made it happen. He sang the love song in a way that made you realise a reality that existed not outside but alongside and even inside the one you were accustomed to.”

It’s not all heightened rumination, though. Williams has a few strategies that give energy and tension to the novel. A stranger, Christy, boards with Noe’s grandparents and befriends him. Christy is ostensibly in town to work on the electrification project but is really there to right a romantic wrong, a situation that keeps us guessing until the very end. There’s also is the tender awakening of Noe’s romantic desires: He develops crushes on first one, then another, and yet a third daughter of the local doctor. This story line enhances the comic sensibility that is subtly present throughout the book, tempering its elegiac tone.

This Is Happiness is wise, witty, wonderful and just perfect for chilly autumn afternoons beside a fire.