Unhappy with "Happy"

Happy: A Memoir by Alex Lemon

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


"My new body. My girlfriend. My friends. My life. And I'm too afraid to let anyone see me. I've always been afraid people would think I was a pussy, and now, that's exactly what I am."

"Happy" is the story of the young American male. Probably it would be of great interest to anyone curious about what a wide range of ways to be angry really exist in this world. He loves his mother, but hates that love. His attachments to his friends are always ambiguous, and sealed only with sentences that contain "fuck" and "shit" more than once ("You're fucking bush league! BUSH LEAGUE HAPPY!"). His love for girls is hopelessly symbolic of his deeper desire for purity, pure attachments. He is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Alex's problematic attachments become the subject of close meditation when he discovers, in his freshman year, that he is suffering from brain hemorrhaging. His illness opens up a gap between him and the person he thought he was, which allows him to write. At least, so the reader must deduce, for this half-way lyrical look at the angry young man of today ("The world whirls when I crack open") contains no direct examination of the craft of writing, or its role in the protagonist's story. There's also only the clumsiest sense of direction to the narrative arc -- it's drafted out in 11 parts, but I don't have the energy to figure out why. Maybe there's a climax in parts 6-10, maybe not. I suppose the great victory of this book is that the boy learns to have a healthy attachment to his mother, but then, as Chris Rock would say, "What you want, a cookie? You supposed to respect yo momma, punk. Why is that so damn meritorious?"

PS to self: Now I remember where I heard about the book -- in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, when I was down for Grandma's funeral. They actually liked it, presumably for its realistic depiction of medical trauma, the experience of angry adolescents, and those aforesaid half-lyricism, e.g. "Over the ochre butte a blackbird wheels in the sky." But these lines come off as unnecessary, and therefore facile to this reader.

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