BookBrowse Reviews This Is Happiness by Niall Williams

BookBrowse:

In Niall Williams's keenly observed, lyrical novel, a long-dormant love story is revived against the backdrop of rural electrification in Ireland.

Niall Williams's This Is Happiness offers an extraordinary portrait of a particular moment in the history of one small corner of Ireland. The novel begins in the late 1950s, as several remarkable events converge in the tiny town of Faha, in County Kerry. Just as the townspeople are preparing for the sacred observations of Holy Week, two things happen simultaneously: a man named Christy arrives to start laying cable that will connect Faha to Ireland's slowly expanding electrical grid (see Beyond the Book) and it stops raining. The second fact here seems, to the novel's narrator, more of a wonder than electric lights; rain is such a constant in this part of Ireland that life without it seems like a different set of possibilities: "In Faha your clothes were rain and your skin was rain and your house was rain with a fireplace."

To 17-year-old Noel (Noe) Crowe, who has recently arrived in Faha from Dublin to stay with his grandparents following his withdrawal from seminary and the slow decline of his mother, the nearly unimaginable change in the weather makes the arrival of Christy seem that much more remarkable. Noe has plenty of opportunities to observe Christy, who is also lodging with Noe's grandparents while he performs his work.

Young Noe finds himself a willing apprentice (and eventual accomplice) to the much older man, especially once he comes to discover that electrifying Faha is not the most important reason for Christy's arrival in the village. Christy, in fact, has come to Faha in hopes of reconnecting with the woman he once knew (and loved) as Alice Mooney, but whom residents of Faha know as Mrs. Annie Gaffney, a respected widow who has taken over as the town's chemist since the death of her husband. Almost before he knows it, Noe finds himself accompanying Christy on early morning serenades and spontaneous road trips. And over time, Noe—who arrived in Faha utterly adrift and without a sense of where he was meant to be or why—becomes profoundly grateful to be in just the right place and time to watch Christy and Annie's decades-long love story come to its bittersweet resolution.

Williams—whose previous novel History of the Rain was longlisted for the Booker Prize—does something quite remarkable with the narration of his latest novel. This Is Happiness is narrated by a present-day Noe, now an old man, recalling with vivid clarity the events of what might be called the last summer of his boyhood. As present-day Noe recounts his youthful friendship with the much older Christy, the narration melds together the younger Noe's naivete and sense of wonder and the older Noe's long-range perspective and wisdom.

Particularly given this narrative structure—an old man recalling his youthful exploits—This Is Happiness could easily veer into the realms of sentimentality, but it never does. There's a type of nostalgia, to be sure, especially as Faha—like the rest of rural Ireland—sits on the brink of an entirely new way of life. But there's no wistful longing to bring back those days of yore—just an honest reckoning that, as fondly as those days and people and adventures may be remembered, they now exist only as memories, recalled with genuine appreciation of having not only witnessed but truly lived through such times.

Williams's writing can be both grounded in keenly drawn details of character and place and also lyrical in its descriptions of everything from heartbreak ("I loved you once is among the saddest lines in humanity") to the weather:

It came dressed as drizzle, as mizzle, as mist, as showers, frequent and widespread, as a wet fog, as a damp day, a drop, a dreeping, and an out-and-out downpour.

As in this passage, Williams's prose is frequently whimsical and inventive, again helping to counteract any tendencies toward the maudlin or melancholy and urging readers—like young Noe himself does—to make themselves at home in Faha and live through the stories they discover there.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in January 2020, and has been updated for the October 2021 edition. Click here to go to this issue.