I recently read, and enjoyed, This Is Happiness, the 2019 novel by the Irish writer, Niall Williams. Consider this a recommendation.
This Is Happiness is set in mid-twentieth century, rural Ireland and the small, rainy town of Faha. It is a moment of great cultural change ushered in, as it so often is, by technology. The coming of “the electric” is the backdrop against which Williams tells his tale.
It is at once a coming-of-age story as well as a story of making peace at life’s end. Seventeen-year-old Noe, the novel’s narrator, finds first (unrequited) love, loses faith and finds it in a new form.
The other main character, the colorful, roguish Christy, seeks peace as an older man. Christy returns to Faha ostensibly to work on the rural electrification project. His real motivation in returning is to reconnect and reconcile with the lost love of his youth, Annie Mooney. More than 50 years ago, he left her standing at the altar, literally.
Williams is an unusually poetic writer with many rich turns of phrase. I thought I would just share a few of the those passages that especially touched me.
As he writes, Noe looks back. He is now the age his grandparents, Doady and Ganga, were in the earlier story. Noe once lived with Doady and Ganga. Christy comes to board with them, sharing the attic bedroom with young Noe. “I myself am [now] seventy-eight years and telling here, of a time over six decades ago,” writes our narrator. “I know it seems unlikely that Faha then might have been the place to learn how to live, but in my experience the likely is not in God’s lexicon.”
Love that phrase: “The likely is not in God’s lexicon.” My own belief is that God has a preferential option for the unlikely. The people and places the world counts as small, unimportant, perhaps foolish are God’s preferred canvas. As Scripture has it, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom.”
By the time the 78-year-old Noe writes his story, the world he knew and which was personified in his grandparents, is long gone. “The truth is,” he reflects, “like all places in the past, it cannot be found any longer. There is no way to get there except this way. And I am reconciled to that. You live long enough you understand prayers can be answered on a different frequency than the one you were listening for. We all have to find a story to live by and live inside, or we couldn’t endure the certainty of suffering. This how it seems to me.”
The title phrase, This Is Happiness, is not straightforward in its meaning, and more enigmatic. Christy pronounces it not at a moment of crowning happiness or satisfaction, but even as the prospects of connection and forgiveness from a mortally ill Annie Mooney seem somewhere between unlikely and nil.
Noe the narrator writes, “It [i.e. Christy’s pronouncement, “This is happiness”] was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.
“I think of that often. We can all pause right here, raise our heads, take a breath and accept that This is happiness, and the bulky blue figure of Christy cycling across the next life would be waving a big slow hand in the air at all of us coming along behind him.”
“This is happiness,” about equal parts proverb, blessing, and paradox, is uttered not because everything is grand or we have managed to achieve some definitive victory. Rather, in the midst of life’s messiness and beauty, sorrow and joy, it can be said — must be said — “this is happiness.”
These days it seems that happiness is often defined in other ways, chiefly materially. We have made it. We have the big house, the car(s)/trucks, life’s accoutrements and status symbols. We have climbed to the top of the some heap, achieved some distinction. Or we are chronically unhappy, aggrieved.
Williams offers a different vision and a different definition of “happiness.” Not so much something we get, as something we are given. Given in the midst of life’s on-goingness, its incompleteness and trials. We need not wait for happiness. It is here. It is now. Or it is, Williams seems to be telling us, not at all.
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What a great foundation for a sermon, if you get the chance! I also enjoyed this novel, but had half-forgotten it, so thanks for the refresher. I’m struck by your idea that God has a preference for unlikeliness, because I’ve recently been considering the idea that a capacity for unlikeliness might be a basic advantage humans have relative to AI, which is built on deep calculations of likeliness. An instinct for sometimes taking the road less traveled and sometimes going off-road altogether might be a human trait that AI never replicates well. It certainly gets in trouble when it tries, and generates absurd hallucinations.