THE SAD TRUTH ABOUT HAPPINESS
By Anne Giardini. Fourth Estate. 278 pp. $23.95
A first novel is always a manifesto of sorts. For good or ill, it's a declaration of one's literary intentions. Canadian writer Anne Giardini has a lot to declare in The Sad Truth About Happiness , so much so that her book is packed, like real life, with all kinds of things that don't necessarily go together and that sometimes take on a life of their own.
Giardini's debut is complicated by the fact that her mother, Carol Shields, was a celebrated author who died of breast cancer in 2003. (Shields's best-known book, The Stone Diaries , won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995.) Shields never got a chance to read Giardini's novel, which shares a few thematic preoccupations with her books about women, motherhood and the provisional nature of happiness. But the impulse to make comparisons between the two women's work ought to be resisted because such distinctions serve less to illuminate those works than to point out the cleverness of the distinction-makers.
Granting Giardini the courtesy of being evaluated on her own, then, what kinds of declarations does she make in The Sad Truth About Happiness ? Maggie Selgrin, the 32-year-old narrator, spends the first half of the novel in dreamy lethargy and the second half in sleepless commotion. Burdened with a combination of insomnia and spiritual numbness, Maggie worries a lot about happiness. She considers herself "a lucky person, raised in good fortune" by loving parents in safe and tidy Vancouver, British Columbia. She's the calm middle daughter between two stormy, self-absorbed sisters and has managed to land a satisfying job as a mammography technician, as well as a great apartment. But when a magazine quiz asks if she is happy, her answer -- "Not completely" -- guarantees, or so the quiz determines, that she will die young: In fact, it insists, she has only three months to live.
What to do? Not really believing this half-baked prophecy but clearly unsettled, Maggie begins to make changes. She starts dating three different men. Despite a completely secular upbringing, she stops in regularly at a local church. She attends a few desultory lectures at the university. None of these activities causes much of an uptick in Maggie's stock of happiness, but her leisurely days allow time for lengthy meditations on what absorbs her -- books, houses, the natural beauty surrounding her city, her "manifestly practical" job -- and what annoys her, including the endlessly narcissistic behavior of her sisters, Janet and Lucy.
Midway through the novel, Lucy's latest misadventure finally calls Maggie to decisive action. Lucy has just given birth to a boy whose father might be either her married Italian ex-boyfriend, Gian Luigi, or her fiancé, Ryan. When Gian and his wife fly in from Rome to claim the baby, flanked by lawyers bearing persuasive documents, Maggie snatches her nephew from the hospital nursery and flees to Montreal, where a friend drives with her to hide in a remote alpine town populated entirely, or so it seems, by breast-feeding women and their children. During her idyll in this fairy-tale village, Maggie learns that her apartment in Vancouver has been devastated by a fire that would have killed her had she been home at the time.
Thrilled to have outsmarted the magazine-quiz prophecy, Maggie returns with the baby to face kidnapping charges, a custody battle and Lucy's wrath. Yet far from being displeased with her new impulsiveness, Maggie arrives at a different notion of happiness from the ones she had been rehearsing. "Life is perhaps after all simply this thing and then the next," she muses. "We are all of us improvising. . . . We work it out, how to be happy, but sooner or later comes a change -- sometimes something small, sometimes everything at once -- and we have to start over again."
While the structure of Giardini's novel seems unbalanced, with too few events in its first half and most of the action (some of it less than probable) crammed into the second, such awkwardness doesn't ruin a reader's interest. This kind of book contains most of its gratification in its upholstery, not its design; it's the digressive stuffing here -- on subjects as various as the role of women in Western literature, the resilience of cancer patients and the contemporary zeal for house remodeling -- that gives the novel heft. Instead of a watertight plot, Giardini is more interested in allowing her narrative to echo its theme: "We are constantly adjusting, making it up, feeling our way forward, figuring out how to be and where to go next." This is not a bad itinerary for a first-time novelist whose peripatetic style reveals an attractive curiosity about the infinite variety in peoples' lives, both happy and sad. ·
Donna Rifkind reviews regularly for Book World.
