Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

Happiness Falls by Angie Kim felt a little bit like a mini-bloggy book club because so many people were reading it. I felt obligated to read it to be part of the discussion. 

The story is told from the point of view of Mia, a college student who is home during the pandemic with her mother, father, twin brother John, and  her disabled fourteen-year-old brother Eugene. One day Eugene goes out to the woods with his father, but comes home alone, upset, covered in dirt and blood, and no one knows where their father has gone. Unfortunately, Eugene's disability means that he cannot communicate with the family or the police about what happened. 

What follows is the family's search for the father, secrets being revealed, and endless passages about the research the father was undergoing about happiness. 

I have three minor critiques here.

1) I found the tone of the main protagonist to be quite off-putting. It's relentlessly negative. The very first paragraph of the book includes the sentences: I don't believe in optimism. I believe there's a fine line (if any) between optimism and willful idiocy, so I try to avoid optimism altogether, lest I fall over the line mistakenly. (page 3)  On one hand, this relentless glass half empty attitude is great characterization, but it also made me not want to spend time with her and it definitely didn't make me feel like I cared about what happened to her family since she herself didn't seem to care very much. 

Also, don't get me started on the random musings about happiness research and the happiness quotient. I am 100% sure none of that nonsense paid off in the end.  

2) I was bothered by the use of the pandemic as a plot point. There's a point when they are in a police station and the author makes a point about talking about how everyone's wearing masks, but then describes  a woman as "looked like our high school librarian - short, flat all-white hair atop a long, narrow face with a pointy chin" (page 141), but there's no way her chin would have been visible.  In June of 2020, just about every one of my waking thoughts was about the pandemic and while I acknowledge that my experience wasn't like that of everyone's, the use of the pandemic as a plot point only when it was convenient (as in, there is an outbreak so X won't happen) didn't endear me to the story.  

3) The father is a missing person in this book. And that's fine, but it was hard to feel really invested in what happened to him when there was no development of his character because he's also an entirely missing character in the book. The author would just tell you his character traits, rather than slip in a little anecdote or remembrance about him so we'd get to know him better. 

Dad was one of those naturally hyper-skeptical people. You know the type, who equate cynicism with depth and intellect, who go around saying "anecdotal proof" is oxymoronic, who demand objective evidence, by which they mean quantifiable and replicable data from double-blind placebo-controlled tests. (page 270)

Wouldn't it have been so much better if we'd had a scene in which the father did/said those things instead of just having the main speaker say it? It was a really frustrating part of the book because the father was so crucial in just how much you as a reader would care about the outcome of the book.

But my biggest critique is one that I'm not seeing or hearing much, so I'd be curious if my reading is wrong. 

I feel about how this book deals with disability the same way I feel about how The Friend Zone deals with women's health. I'm going to enter into some spoilers here, so if you're going to read this book and want to go in cold, stop reading. (SERIOUSLY! SPOILERS AHEAD.) 

Remember how in The Friend Zone, Abby Jimenez wrote an ending in which a woman's IUD falls out during a heavy flow and has a completely normal, healthy pregnancy ending in a healthy baby? Do you remember how Jimenez wrote an author's note about how this totally happened to her friend and it wasn't actually about the pregnancy ANYWAY.  Do you remember how irate I was? Because it downplayed the difficulties that so many women have with fertility and dismissed the most likely outcome of the character's situation?  And, also, using birth as the ending of a romance novel makes the book much less interesting. Wouldn't it have been so much better if the couple had to overcome this obstacle and go in a different direction?!

Well, here I am feeling the same way about THIS BOOK. In the end, it turns out that while Eugene cannot speak, he can communicate. And the book just ignores the reality of what life is like for so many people who do have disabilities that means they cannot communicate. And then in the author's note, the author has the GALL to write about how this DOES happen and the technology does allow for some people with certain types of disabilities to communicate, even if they were thought to be nonverbal before. 

But what are the odds? The odds are that this WOULD NOT HAPPEN THIS WAY. Eugene would not be able communicate, the case would go cold, the family would have to adapt. And I think that would have made for a much more interesting story and ending overall.  Why are there not more people in the disability community upset about this?!

Anyway, this was a miss for me. I haven't read the author's debut novel, Miracle Creek, and I don't think this is encouragement for me to do. 2/5 stars

Lines of note:

When an emergency happens, you expect the whole world to shut down, or at least you wish it would, because, of course, your own world has. (page 122)

I remember how ordinary the world was when my MIL was dying. In that house, everything was centered on taking care of her and how we would make her last days as good as possible, but we still had to go to work, find insurance providers, and buy groceries. It just all seemed surreal. 

I thought how I didn't really look at my friends' parents, how they seemed more like blobs who perform societal roles rather than distinct people whose specific facial, vocal, and other features I actually process and retain. (page 136)

I mean, isn't this true about most people we know? We don't really take in all the visual information we're provided with, do we? (Or maybe you do. I certainly do not.)

Math, I dismissed as something akin to manual labor, merely indicative of one's ability to contribute to society in a menial way, like a worker bee to a hive. But verbal acuity, that was what I myself admired and equated with intelligence. Didn't everyone? Wasn't that why everyone loved those fast-talking (and therefore smart) characters in The West Wing? (page 271-272)

Huh. I don't really feel this way, but I found myself persuaded by this argument.

Hat mentions:

They commented publicly on John's post, and less than a minute later, in this private platform, they posted selfies with huge smiles, confetti, party hats framing looks of orgasmic joy plastered on their faces - it seemed lewd, like I should avert my eyes, the incontrovertible evidence punching me in the gut. (page 246)

"I asked this woman if I could use her phone to text you, but she was all suspicious, and her hat blew off so I got it for her, and she went crazy and told me to get away." (page 279)