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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. Dazzlingly zeitgeisty, Hanna Jameson’s Are You Happy Now? cuts to the core of our times, exploring what it means to be happy, to love, and to live in the heightened context of a mystery psychogenic illness. It’s an un-put-down-able blast of story-telling genius — dark, smart, and funny with it. That’s my problem. Everyone feels like the right person, I can’t even tell the difference any more. I ride the subway and see someone reading a book I was just reading and think, Wow, maybe it’s you. It happens all the time. Someone looks at me and it’s just them. You know what I mean?
I know, it sounds depressing as all hell, and it is to a degree, but it's also sharp and well written. The notion of a mental health crisis as a literal epidemic is nothing new, but the execution is fresh. Jameson had written the first draft of her debut, award-nominated novel - SOMETHING YOU ARE - at just seventeen. Something You Are and two further novels in the series - GIRL SEVEN and ROAD KILL - are available now in the UK, Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands. I'm aware this review is somewhat vague but I think this is a read best served without prior knowledge.
Throughout the novel, Jameson explores happiness, adulthood, loneliness, and connectedness. Her characters deal with failure, disappointment, and their own impotence, ‘smallness’, in the face of all that is going on in their world. I loved how many moments of vulnerability, kindness, and love we got. I also found myself relating very much with the many instances where characters are struggling to cope: with their own life, with their own unhappiness, and with taking accountability. Yun, Emory, Andrew, and Fin’s flaws and idiosyncrasies are what made them memorable and real. Although I am more of a Yun/Fin, Andrew had my heart. He was such a gem. His kindness, his alertness to other people's feelings, his selflessness…getting to know him was a delight. This is a novel abo The writing is very easy to get into. It flowed nicely and wasn’t too high-brow. It still had some beautiful nuggets of prose, but it still read really well and kept me hooked throughout. Jameson’s writing is so easily digestible. Some of her prose delivers a punch directly to the gut, a left hook swinging from out of nowhere. 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.
Bob Mortimer wins 2023 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with The Satsuma Complex Comparisons to Emily St. John Mandel should be ignored, imvho, but otherwise it's a solid dystopian take on the anger and sense of injustice that permeates throughout contemporary twentysomething culture.I thought the premise was potentially very interesting - basically a mental health 'epidemic' - and the central question of whether this was caused by people becoming victim to an infectious agent or simply 'giving up' on life was very brave of the author. Llegué a esta novela porque la anterior novela de Jameson, ‘Los últimos’, me pareció una interesante propuesta dentro del trillado género detectivesco, aunque la ejecución fuera finalmente fallida. Desgraciadamente, leyendo esta nueva obra de la autora me encuentro con una situación similar.
All the characters are flawed and act out on their individual insecurities and anxieties. There were moments where I empathised with them but many times where I got quite frustrated with them too. What started out as a meet cute between Emory and Yun becomes a lot more complicated. I particularly loved the intimacy and complex dynamics between Yun and Andrew’s friendship. Not because of age. Being in your thirties meant nothing. But by then, people tended to have acquired things that gradually cut them off from all the places […] they imagined more exciting lives were taking place. I found Andrew and Fin’s relationship to be more interesting. Although their dynamic is in some ways more straightforward (but not entirely), I found myself wanting to delve more into their interactions than any others.
LoveReading Says
Even more so than in her previous novel, The Last, Jameson bypasses the usual apocalyptic storylines, as she grounds her quietly dystopic concept firmly into reality. There is a minimalism to Jameson’s alternate/what if reality that brought to mind the subdued yet ominous world-building of authors such Kazuo Ishiguro, Emily St. John Mandel, Ling Ma, whose works are often characterized by a faintly ominous atmosphere. Yun, Emory, Fin and Andrew attend the wedding; their lives entwine as the “psychogenic death experience” takes hold of society and the story follows them along a sinister end of the world trajectory. The novel doesn’t just ask how we can exist in a doomed world but how we can love a damaged person, interrogating their intense, tangled relationships. What a difficult book to categorize, rate, and review! Nothing feels straightforward with this read, including the plot, the character dynamics, and the characters themselves. I finished the read feeling thoroughly bewildered. Fin is probably the character I like the most, but damn, this book made me deal with some flawed (and in some cases unlikeable) characters. Which I don’t mind, but there was just not enough about Yun to let me like him or feel very sorry for him. And I feel like that should have been the case?
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