Drug addicts at a party, a colonoscopy patient in a loveless marriage and a dog named Jesus.
These are a few of the characters in A Way to Be Happy, UBC alumnus Caroline Adderson’s latest collection of short stories, which was recently announced to have been longlisted for the Giller Prize. These listed individuals may sound intriguing enough to spark a reader’s interest, but unfortunately, for most readers, that spark will soon be extinguished.
A Way to Be Happy is a composite work of new and old writing (three of the eight stories in the book have been previously published), but this mix of new and old leads one to question whether they share anything more in common than an author. The press release for the book certainly thinks so — it describes the stories, although disparate in tone and theme, as being centred on what it means to find happiness.
This assessment is questionable at best. As a collection, A Way to Be Happy feels very artificial. The individual stories often bear no discernable relation to each other, and without the guidance of the book’s description, it would have been very difficult to identify the theme as “finding happiness.”
Indeed, in roughly half of the stories, the characters wind up miserable — neither our drug-addicted protagonist nor our “Redneck Gourmet” sees an ounce of joy at the end of their stories. Is there anything wrong with a short story collection without a theme? Not necessarily, but themes shouldn’t be conjured out of thin air.
This isn’t to say that all the stories in A Way to Be Happy are bad, by any means. As with any work of this type, and especially with the wide time frame of writing it encompasses, the quality will vary from story to story.
For instance, “From the Archives of the Hospital for the Insane” appears at the very end of the collection and is exceptionally well-written. The story is about Margaret, a woman committed to a New Westminster asylum in the early 20th century. Adderson’s narration of the woman’s life creates a striking juxtaposition between Margaret’s tender storytelling and the sterile institution of the hospital by inserting cold, analytical, but still relevant lines from the hospital’s forms and regulations. It’s a praiseworthy piece of writing — it lets Adderson’s occasionally jarring personal style really shine, striking empathy for Margaret into the heart of the reader at every corner.
“Charity,” also from the latter half of the collection, is similarly well-polished. It follows a man raised in a tumultuous home and school environment through his life’s decline, then his redemption via bone marrow donation. Although there were parts that were hard to read (the second, near-absurdist, quasi-sex scene was particularly off-putting), the quality of the rest of the story was more than worth powering through those moments.
The other stories in the collection did not quite meet the standards set by the two previously mentioned. Most were simply fine, if boring, with perhaps one moment to make the story linger in your mind (“The door flew open, striking the dresser, and Jesus leapt” — a particularly well-done quote from an otherwise unmemorable story). The lingering, however, wasn’t always positive. In “Obscure Objects,” a previously published story, the narrator describes two young children’s buttocks as “peach-like” and remarks on how “coquettish” they were at such a young age, a passage made doubly uncomfortable by the first-person narration in the story (the only story to have this feature in the collection).
Some of the stories in the collection have received no mention in this review, and that is because they didn’t have any notable elements, good or bad. It is impossible to write at length, for example, about “Started Early, Took My Dog.” There’s simply not enough to analyze, and it is difficult to point out any outstanding features from a relatively flat story. This is A Way to Be Happy’s fatal flaw — monotony. Reading the book is a chore, especially through the slower-moving stories, and it is hard to imagine finishing the collection without willful, conscious effort toward that goal.
A Way to Be Happy is not perfect, far from it — frankly, it’s not a particularly good collection. Many of the stories are uneventful, few are memorable for the right reasons and searching for the theme of the collection inside the stories bears no fruit. Caroline Adderson is a talented writer, as evidenced by “Charity” and “From the Archives of the Hospital for the Insane,” both quite well-done, but they fail to redeem the collection as a whole.
A Way to Be Happy is a swing and a miss in Adderson’s otherwise distinguished career, and for the average reader, likely not worth the effort.
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