{"id":5613,"date":"2016-05-03T06:14:43","date_gmt":"2016-05-03T10:14:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5613"},"modified":"2016-05-03T06:14:43","modified_gmt":"2016-05-03T10:14:43","slug":"wheres-the-happy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5613","title":{"rendered":"Where’s the Happy?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Kate

Kate Winslet (Marianne Dashwood) & Alan Rickman (Col. Brandon) in Sense & Sensibility<\/p><\/div>\n

Novelist Carrie Brown<\/a>, in an essay in the Glimmer Train<\/em> bulletin this month, advocates a reassessment of the components of conflict that writers incorporate in their work. Too often, she believes, less experienced writers, especially, lean too heavily on catastrophe. They include \u201ctoo much dark and not enough light,\u201d believing only the bad stuff is dramatic.<\/p>\n

Bad stuff happening is the meat and potatoes of the genre I read most often\u2014mysteries and thrillers. Yet even there, excess abounds. Authors feel compelled to pile up ever more bodies, to make the manner of death ever more grisly, to include female characters who might offer a hope of happiness only to put them out of reach, often because they\u2019re dead, to give their protagonists\u2019 souls so many dark places to hide that after a while, I wonder, \u201cwhy does this character get out of bed in the morning?\u201d When I start rolling my eyes, the author has lost me.<\/p>\n

Brown believes \u201cthe mystery of people inclined toward charity or kindness has a drama as compelling as a story of decline and despair.\u201d These positive forces are as powerful and as complicated as the impulses that propel other people toward evil. Jane Austen knew this. So did Dickens.<\/p>\n

The key to presenting happiness well, she says, is to capture its complexity and contradictions. She uses an example \u201cweeping with happiness.\u201d Think of Emma Thompson in the movie Sense and Sensibility<\/em>, crying with great, gasping sobs (see the clip!<\/a>) when she realizes that Edward Ferrars is in fact not<\/em> married. We are infinitely more moved by her happy tears than if she\u2019d simply grinned delightedly.<\/p>\n

It is not easy for people to be happy, and it is especially not easy for them to be happy when they have been beset by all the other fictional difficulties authors throw at them. But, Brown might argue, these characters can\u2014and should\u2014be happy for that precise reason. She says happiness depends \u201con the nearby presence of unhappiness to be felt most acutely. By necessity, it seems, the happiest man will also be the man most aware of unhappiness.\u201d Going back to Sense and Sensibility<\/em>, that would be lovely Colonel Brandon.<\/p>\n

An example from Brown\u2019s own work is her 2013 novel The Last First Day<\/em>, in which a long-married couple\u2014the headmaster of the Derry School for Boys and his wife\u2014must face the declining health that forces his retirement. Said Reeve Lindbergh<\/a> in her review of the book for The Washington Post<\/em>, \u201cTerrible things happen and have happened. These people struggle and are hurt. . . . Nevertheless, [the author shows] one can see with clarity and with appreciation for certain glimpsed miracles in every day, whatever else the day brings.\u201d One is capable of a kind of happiness.
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