Happiness Forever
By Adelaide Faith
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Both simple and complex, melancholy and delightful, Happiness Forever is a book of contradictions, emotions, and Sylvie’s (our main character’s) interior life.
Happiness Forever follows Sylvie as she traverses her life inside and outside of the therapy hour. She is only happy “when she’s in therapy” because “Sylvie is in love with her therapist.” But when the therapist tells Sylvie news of her retirement, will all their progress come undone?
On one hand, I appreciated how the relationship between Sylvie and the therapist progressed. It never crossed boundaries even if, at times, Sylvie wished it would. The therapist is never named and most of the information we receive is projected onto the therapist from Sylvie. This creates an interesting dychotomy of what we know and what we think we know.
What this novel excels at is the depiction of Sylvie herself. The progression of the therapy sessions and all of her thoughts created an interesting and dynamic character. The true sense of Sylvie shines through with every venture into the world.
On the other hand, because of that focus on Sylvie’s interior world, there wasn’t a lot happening. The book was filled with conversations, thoughts, and retellings of conversations. While this isn’t inherently negative, at times it slowed the pace and the story began to feel stalled.
The therapist and Sylvie talk about bettering herself and how to deal with situations in the real life, we don’t see much of the results. It felt as though we were stuck in the therapy world instead of the outside world and that repition was sucking us in instead of pushing us out.
The message of the book got lost in all of Sylvie’s thoughts and, at the end, of reading, I felt dissapointed. The build toward something didn’t reach what I thought where the peak would be. At the end, I kept thinking there should be more.
Overall, it didn’t quite meet my expectations.
My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC. It’s out now!
Further reading:
One book that I think handles the theme of obsession well is The Vegetarian by Han Kang. While maybe not obviously similar, I kept thinking about Kang’s book while reading.
Quotes:
“I remember thinking he was talking on a deeper level than other people, and I felt so happy with him then, and so happy with myself for my choice of boyfriend.”
“‘I think it was your fantasy that these girls looked like natural animals,’ the therapists says. ‘We don’t know what was going on inside their heads, we don’t know what they were going through at home.’”
“You don’t know what’s going on inside a person.”
“When I started feeling that something was missing from me… What I felt like I wasn’t really a person.”
“It’s like you’ve given me this capacity for happiness… but it’s in the shape of you, and nothing else will fit into it, so I won’t be able to use it after therapy ends.”