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However, I didn't particularly enjoy the story. The characters were 20-30 year olds living in New York city and we were witness to their thought processes, motivations and desires, but they mostly seemed selfish and unstable (although perhaps this was the point...) The book focused a great deal on their sexual relationships, which happened to be mostly gay or bisexual, much to the detriment of the main story. Progress was slow and it did unfortunately become rather tedious to read at times.
I wanted you to be happy. I didn’t care what you were doing. It just got too much, watching you do the same thing over and over, and I realized you were never going to stop trying to become this imaginary version of yourself where you’re happy because you’re rich or signed to a big label or something huge like that. Even when things did go well, you were never happy because it wasn’t like this ultimate fantasy you already made up in your head. […] It was really hard to be around, to be with someone who was just never happy. He wondered why he always seemed destined to be slightly too far ahead or too far behind his own life.” It was like he didn’t understand that relationships were all about power. They were about control, about who could endure the longest without visibly caring. Andrew was always giving his power away without a thought, like wasn’t ceding anything. I would describe the genre as soft sci-fi/dystopia within a contemporary novel. It gave me Emily St Mandel vibes and I think if you like her writing you would love Jameson’s too. Emory on the other hand attempts to help him but as the world around her becomes more and more weighed by bad news, she also struggles to make sense of everything that is going on and the gnawing guilt she feels towards her article. For all her attempts to make things work and his longing to be happy, content even, their relationship continues to fray.
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As far as she could tell, what Yun wanted from his parents was impossible. He wanted them to have made him happy. Jameson utiliza esta pandemia como reflexión de la vida de estrés y las presiones que todos ponemos a otros y a nosotros mismos por tener que hacer ciertas cosas vitales como parte fundamental de nuestra vida. At a New York City wedding, on a sweltering summer night, four people are trying to be happy. Yun has everything he ever wanted, but somehow it's never enough. Emory is finally making her mark, but feels the shame more than the success. Some of the story at times almost feels too clean, as though some plot points are at times too convenient, and it’s certainly an imperfect novel. The reader views the world collapsing around 4 main characters (Yun, Emory, Andrew and Fin) that are each trying to navigate this new normal. The dialogue and narrative is deeply personal, in some ways introspective and made me think a lot about what happiness means, and what defines it. Is there such a thing as feeling too much? What if you don’t feel anything?
Hanna Jameson’s Are You Happy Now follows two overlapping and imperfect love stories, both of which begin at the same time and place as a frightening worldwide phenomenon. The novel’s four protagonists – Yun, Emory, Andrew, and Fin – are present at a New York City wedding when one of the guests collapses without explanation. She is alive but unresponsive, appearing to have suddenly just ‘given up’ on living. Soon this mysterious ‘disease’ begins to spread, and we follow Jameson’s protagonists as they grapple with building new relationships whilst the world seemingly collapses around them. But anyway, as mentioned earlier, I found this book hard to decipher. There was subtle dystopia present and yet it didn’t feel world-ending. I interpreted it as a commentary on how people’s mental health was affected by the pandemic and in that regard, it was cleverly written. This was a wild and intriguing sci-fi dystopian. The novel starts off with an ominous gripping line when a “boy meets girl at a wedding and the world ends”. The story follows the four main characters, the way their life changes as they witness the affect of the mysterious catatonia. Yun, an agnostic struggling musician; Emory, a self inflicting news reporter hoping to gain success; Andrew, an underpaid teacher who had never felt much; and Fin, a young ballet dancer fighting against the world. The lives of these characters become intertwined with each other as they watch the harsh reality of NYC. Relationships are created, tested and some are distorted as “love not properly expressed mutated into something jagged”.
LoveReading Says
She lives in London currently, and is working on screenwriting projects. She likes whiskey, history, and emotional Hanna Jameson's fourth novel, part murder mystery and part post-apocalyptic thriller - THE LAST - is out early 2019, with Viking UK and Simon & Schuster - Atria Books US. The Last is the story of an American academic searching for the truth about a girl who has been murdered in his Swiss hotel in the aftermath of a nuclear war that has destroyed most of the Western world. We follow four main characters. First Yun and Andrew, old friends, followed by journalist Emory and dancer Fin. If I’ve unlearned anything about ingesting stories over the past number of years, it’s that I don’t have to love a character to love their story. Which was a necessary perspective when it came to this novel, because our first protagonist is Yun, a jaded musician who is just almost likeable, but somehow never quite made it there for me. His relationship with Emory is interesting, in that it’s imperfect, and sometimes bland and often confusing, and reflects how sometimes we feel most lonely beside the person we’re supposed to be closest to. The narrative’s self-awareness adds to the story. Not only does Jameson touch upon the notion of ‘main character syndrome’ but she reflects on the concept of a narrative arc, examining stories' tendency to provide some sort of closure for their characters. Jameson resists doing this, which will inevitably annoy readers and I have to say that the what-ifs scenarios presented by the ending were the only thing that I did not love about this novel. As the characters contend with old and new hurts, hidden feelings, loneliness and longing, psychogenic catatonia continues to threaten their horizon. Jameson seamlessly switches points of view, often adopting a nonlinear narrative and or using foreshadowing to build and maintain tension. Her prose brought to mind Hanya Yanagihara, Donna Tartt, and Scott Spencer. Jameson’s prose effortlessly moves between registers: from presenting us with clear-cut and incisive descriptions (of the character’s feelings, thoughts, actions, and surroundings), to using her language to evoke with striking intimacy and poignancy the mood and nuances of a certain moment/scene. Jameson’s style maintains a balance between crisp yet opaque, at times eliciting in dazzling detail the state of mind of a character, at times allowing room for the ambiguous nature of her character’s fears and desires to shine. Her dialogues rang true to life, not only in their rhythms but in how they often revolved around or hinted at unspoken feelings. The setting, mostly ‘post’-covid NY, is brought to life. Jameson captures just how easy it is to feel lost and alone in such a city, while also incorporating discussions on current politics and on America’s healthcare service. I went into this read blind and I almost think it’s the best way to read and experience this strange and unsettling dystopian narrative. It could be classed as pandemic fiction but you’ll soon realise the illness that is suddenly affecting clusters of the population (primarily young people) doesn’t seem to be infectious - but potentially a choice? A choice to sit down and give up on life as there’s no hope.
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