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HAPPY FOR YOU
by Claire Stanford
“If a simple algorithm could tell you how happy you are – how happy you are objectively – wouldn’t you want to know?” Early in Claire Stanford’s gripping and brilliantly written debut novel, The Happiness, a character asks. Evelyn Kominsky, the book’s highly ambivalent narrator, isn’t so sure about Kumamoto. Her voice asks us questions about happiness, the role of technology in our lives, the importance of the body, and how she can find satisfaction and a sense of belonging in the world.
We meet Evelyn while she is taking leave from her PhD in philosophy. It was a program he struggled to finish a thesis on the “mind-body problem.” He arrives in the bright tech country which is humorously called “the third most popular internet company”. Evelyn’s new boss, Dr. Luce poses the rhetorical question above during a talk she gave to launch the company’s “happiness project.” Evelyn and her small research team aim to quantify this emotion and present it to consumers in the form of an easy-to-use app.
However, the project doesn’t help alleviate Evelyn’s own ambivalence about her personal fulfillment and direction in life. Regardless, as he becomes financially dependent on the company (which pays more for a “few factor” than graduate school), he finds himself increasingly skeptical and disconnected from the outward optimism of those around him. This includes her white boyfriend, Jamie, who is a happy government employee, to whom Evelyn’s proposal can only be answered “I don’t know” at that moment. His own racial identity contributes to this sense of disconnection; her father was Japanese and her mother, who died when Evelyn was young, was white. “Misfit!” He associates less with other people than with the unusual and overlooked animals in his over-watched nature documentary: the big-headed mole rat, the small-leaved chameleon, the kakapo.
Stanford captures the glamor, absurdity, and menace of corporate spaces with humor and lightness. “I was proud that the third most popular internet company wanted me,” Evelyn thinks; “I was excited to feel useful.” As part of her new job, she is attending the Fifth Annual Global Happiness Summit, which is apparently based on a real event called the World Happiness Summit. She goes to a creepy laugh seminar, experiences sensory deprivation without revealing, sits on a panel where men talk about her, and meets her peers at the market to sell happiness. One describes an energy bar as “380 calories, 12 grams of fat, 18 grams of protein and unlimited possibilities.”
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