I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder: book review
Chuck is 35 and works as a copywriter in London, where he lives in a swanky apartment. The problem is that this apartment was mostly paid for by his ex-fiance who is obviously no longer contributing to the rent, his few drinks to take the edge off are coasting into alcoholism, and he's being silently demoted in his hybrid job, the big projects going to the new graduates more and more often. But all of that comes later. When he meets Joey, his life is still relatively contained.
Joey is 23, a barista and a poet trying her best to make it work in the city. She has a close friend group and a full life, even as she feels external pressure to figure out the course of her big picture existence. Everyone's always asking when she'll get a "real job." She meets Chuck at a bar, and the two fall into a relationship—though Chuck flinches away from any definition as correctly concrete as that. They text at socially appropriate intervals, she comes over to his house and they have sex, they go out to bars and then go back to his, they drift around one another. They like each other, despite the gap in their ages and lives.
Really, though, their lives aren't that far from one another. They're both aspiring writers who don't love their day jobs. Joey is a poet who studied writing in college but has been somewhat discouraged by the magazine world. Still, she's wide-eyed and hungry, engaged with contemporary literature and immersing herself in the books similar to what she wants to write. Joey has tangible promise that glows off her. This is a true contrast to Chuck who is a self-aggrandizing type. He thinks his novella is god's gift to earth. He turns his nose up at the writers Joey enjoys, really, at any writer living today. He fancies himself totally unique. As the book progresses, it becomes clear that he truly cannot take being around Joey's genuine sense of promise and openness to the world. It's funny. A lot of Chuck's more masked aspects of his character come out through their discussions of the literary scene. I have definitely known Chucks. They're not all middle-aged either.
But as their non-relationship progresses and Joey hopes that it might materialize into something tangible, Chuck is coming undone. He's almost a decade older than Joey, but his life is maybe two steps ahead of hers. She loves his apartment, so chic compared to her shared flat, but he's coveting his friends' townhouses. He feels distinctly behind, which is where he wanted to put himself when he combusted his twelve-year relationship. The end of the book details Chuck's collapse into himself.
This is a largely plot-less book. It's a microscopic investigation of life in 2026. The jobs we have, the living situations we find, the reality of checking when someone was last active on WhatsApp and wondering why they haven't texted you. It questions the lack of definition that plague our relationships and the substandard situations we'll justify, put up with, and miss. It's a tight camera look at two people whose lives briefly intersect. I enjoyed watching Joey and Chuck aimlessly drift through their days. It's a super fast read, which keeps it compelling. I read it over a month because there were other things I had to read in-between chapters, which I think makes it harder for me to see the full picture, but I finished the last 100 pages in an afternoon, which is a better reflection of the pace and probably how it was meant to be read.
What's maybe most compelling is that we rarely get to see the POV of the person who won't commit, who disappears from a non-relationship, who inflicts the emotional havoc. Usually, we just see the confusing fallout. Here, we know exactly what motivates Chuck's choices, the things that Joey can't know. They make sense, no matter how unfair they are to her. It shows just how banal relationships really are at their most basic level. How someone being in a messy phase of their life or still being hung up on an ex can cost you a future. The book also answers the question of if they ever wonder about you afterwards.
I appreciate how well-drawn Joey is. As someone who might as well be Joey, I was pleased that nothing threw me out of the story, which isn't always the case with books about twenty-something girls written by men. It feels very current in a fully-realized, embodied way. I love seeing my tiny, private-feeling experiences reflected back to me in literature, and I'll always be cheering for the books that take a detailed look at modern life and render it into novel form where everything happens inside and nothing happens outside. I appreciate the reminder that books like that can score a Faber lead title spot and a blurb from Sally Rooney. That makes my heart happy.
I didn't quite love this book as much as I thought I would when I first picked it up. For one, my expectations were sky-high. There are a few things attempted early on, like not filling in certain details until they fall into conversation and naturally populate themselves, that are interesting but don't feel fully realized. There's a general inconsistency overall in the amount of detail proffered by the third person narrator. Some things are brand-named while others are not. The precision felt like it leached out of the writing as the book continued on, Calder perhaps losing specificity as fatigue grew, and there were moments that could've been tighter considering the writing and characterization are what this book is riding on.
The ending is also interesting. Calder leaves us on a cliffhanger, but he builds enough scaffolding in the lead-up to the scene that you're shoved towards the more optimistic belief that would almost be too saccharine if he said it directly. Still, if you want to be a pessimist, the option is there too. I think I like the ending? But I'm also not entirely sure. This is a hard plane to land.
Still, I would love to see more books like I Want You to Be Happy out in the world. If you hang out in lit circles at all, there will be many a page you'll be able to text your friends and have a good laugh over.
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