Book Review: ‘I Want You to Be Happy,’ by Jem Calder
I WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY, by Jem Calder
The English writer Jem Calder’s 2022 story collection, “Reward System,” is full of long-suffering women and long-winded men. Calder’s women are talked “at” — his preposition — about how the buttons pedestrians press at crosswalks are “placebos, emblematic of a culture-wide individualist fantasy”; about why “you basically never hear the term ‘peak oil’ anymore”; about how there’s, like, no regulatory body protecting us from companies selling our data. This last rant spins off into a drunken confession: “Oh man, Julia. If I imagine myself as you, hearing me saying all this, that’s embarrassing. Sorry. I know you don’t, uh — I just really like you.”
Calder isn’t raising accusations of mansplaining; he’s more interested in revealing what these men are least capable of saying by drawing attention to all the Roman empires they can’t shut up about. Not that Calder’s women are any better at expressing themselves, or asking for attention, validation, love. They tend to overthink things and keep any conclusions to themselves. Everyone loses.
On the very first page of Calder’s debut novel, “I Want You to Be Happy,” 35-year-old Chuck finds himself being uncharacteristically forthcoming. He’s in a London bar, telling a 23-year-old barista he just met about his split from his girlfriend of 12 years, to whom he was engaged just three months ago. “He had promised himself he wouldn’t talk about it and now here he was, talking about it.” This is a handy introduction to Chuck, who often says one thing and does the opposite.
We meet the barista, Joey, miscast in the role of the chill girl. “No-no, I like it,” she says after Chuck spends several minutes shouting over the music about his ex-fiancée. “It’s like boarding a plane. You go baggage first.”
After an anticlimactic night in bed (“I am normal,” he insists, after failing to perform), Chuck and Joey exchange “touchless goodbyes” and intuit that they will probably never meet again. But he is bored and depressed, a copywriter who considers himself a “creative”; and she, again, is 23.
A situationship ensues. They progress from meeting up at bars to Joey coming over to Chuck’s place directly to him persuading her to let him see her flat, where he negs her about the mess: “So I’m right. You’re the kind of person who eats in bed.” She pushes back on this, a momentary break from the habit she made on their first real date, when “at some point in the night, it had become very important for her to agree with everything Chuck said.” We begin to wonder what Joey sees in him other than the main attraction Calder supplies — she likes his big apartment.
Their encounters start off cute enough: They text about Louise Glück and Frank O’Hara, Joey takes Chuck to a Halloween party, they part ways for Christmas. They’re both writing again — poetry for her, fiction for him. They watch Adam Curtis’s documentary “HyperNormalisation” and Joey cries for her future. Chuck’s brother asks him to dog-sit at his house outside London, which is how Chuck and Joey end up in a rental car together.
Joey understandably sees the getaway as an indication that things are getting serious, which is something she wants, even as it becomes increasingly clear that Chuck is a friendless alcoholic who says he likes her but doesn’t treat her accordingly. The novel takes its title from a tired breakup line, and it tells a familiar story: Here is a man who realizes he needs to do better, and a woman who decides she can; a lukewarm romance between two averagely unhappy people who aren’t right for each other.
In chapters that alternate between their points of view, Calder gives us Chuck’s rock-bottom alongside Joey’s first “real” relationship; she’s entertaining fantasies about the apartment they might one day share while he’s passing out in the shower and being forced to take a leave of absence from work (he tells Joey he got promoted). Calder seems a little too taken with the adage that there are two sides to every story, two wholly different relationships in one. It’s true, but it doesn’t stay interesting for long. “I think we’re just having a good time and seeing where things go,” Chuck tells her late in the book, “annoyed at having to resort to clichés to answer a cliché.”
I’d like to think Calder is toying with a level of irony by making Chuck an overconfident and unpublished writer who likes to complain about the lack of originality in today’s literature. His own genius idea is to write a “novella about a character whose life subtly resembled his own, detailing the kinds of experiences that he rarely saw reflected in contemporary fiction — not that he actually read much of that anymore.” Would Chuck care to explain what kinds of underrepresented experiences he has in mind? Calder, like his main man, seems to want to enlighten us, but can’t always get the words out.
I WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY | By Jem Calder | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 267 pp. | $28
